supply of split wood over a pile of chunks yet untouched by the axe, and exhibiting the result as his finished task had escaped with his fellows upon some expedition of pleasure. He had meant to return in time to complete his work before the cheat should be discovered, but he forgot it.

His father had first thrashed him well for his wickedness, then lectured him tenderly about it. The wicked, he had told him, would not live out 50half their days. Gard’s laugh as he recalled the words was more nearly a snarl.

50

“He was a good man all right,” he said, “but he didn’t know it all; not by an eternal lot.”

He tormented himself with other boyish memories: the broad grassy stretches of the prairie came up before him; the woods that neighbored his father’s farm; the pleasant fields, and occasional low hills that had seemed to him so high, before he had seen mountains; the swimming-pool where he and the fellows played in summer; the skating-pond where they raced and built forts and fought mimic battles in winter; the red brick school-house at “The Corners”; the white church at “The Centre,” where he had gone to Sunday school; the little shed chamber with its creaking stairs that his mother had climbed, how many cold nights! to see if he were warmly covered. She was gone from earth now, but the old boyhood places were left, and he yearned for them all, with yearning unspeakable.

“I thought I was going to get back to it,” he groaned, through his set teeth. “I trusted that poison-snake to help me; God! If I could get these hands on him, just once!”

But the quiet of his hundred and forty-seven days, and the balm of the healing air, had wrought within him more than he knew. His excursions 51afield grew longer, day by day, and in the gray of one beautiful morning he started out to explore the mountain.

51

He had traversed the cañon before now, climbing over rocks, and around mighty boulders washed down by ancient avalanches, or torn from above by titanic storms, until he came to where the mountain stream took a leap of some seventy feet, and the sheer face of the cliff barred his way. This time, however, he followed the cañon’s edge, to which the trees clung precariously, sycamores, oaks, and, to his delight, some walnuts. He marked the spot where they grew, as a place to be visited in the nut season.

The morning was far spent when he 

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