promise--yes, mother, I promise."

* * * * *

A month later, the young man was traveling, as fast as modern steam and
steel could carry him, toward the western edge of the continent.

He was flying from the city of his birth, as from a place accursed. He had
set his face toward a new land--determined to work out, there, his
promise--the promise that he did not, at the first, understand.

How he misunderstood,--how he attempted to use his inheritance to carry
out what he first thought was his mother's wish,--and how he came at last
to understand, is the story that I have to tell.

Chapter II

The Woman with the Disfigured Face

The Golden State Limited, with two laboring engines, was climbing the
desert side of San Gorgonio Pass.

Now San Gorgonio Pass--as all men should know--is one of the two eastern
gateways to the beautiful heart of Southern California. It is, therefore,
the gateway to the scenes of my story.

As the heavy train zigzagged up the long, barren slope of the mountain, in
its effort to lessen the heavy grade, the young man on the platform of the
observation car could see, far to the east, the shimmering, sun-filled
haze that lies, always, like a veil of mystery, over the vast reaches of
the Colorado Desert. Now and then, as the Express swung around the curves,
he gained a view of the lonely, snow-piled peaks of the San Bernardinos;
with old San Gorgonio, lifting above the pine-fringed ridges of the lower
Galenas, shining, silvery white, against the blue. Again, on the southern
side of the pass, he saw San Jacinto's crags and cliffs rising almost
sheer from the right-of-way.

But the man watching the ever-changing panorama of gorgeously colored and
fantastically unreal landscape was not thinking of the scenes that, to
him, were new and strange. His thoughts were far away. Among those
mountains grouped about San Gorgonio, the real value of the inheritance he
had received from his mother was to be tested. On the pine-fringed ridge
of the Galenas, among those granite cliffs and jagged peaks, the mettle of
his manhood was to be tried under a strain such as few men in this
commonplace work-a-day old world are-subjected to. But the young man did
not know this.

On the long journey across the continent, he had paid little heed to the
sights that so interested his fellow passengers. To his fellow passengers,
themselves, he had been as indifferent. To those who h