ll say: a murderer was buried here."

Then he fought no more with the conviction. It gripped his spirit and
cowed him. It sat upon his shoulders and rode home with him. His
mother saw it in his face, and, not understanding, began to look for
some fresh trouble.

She need not have looked for new trouble, so far as concerned things
outside himself. For Jeffrey was doing very well in the world of men.
He had gotten the home rebuilt, a more comfortable and finer home than
it had ever been. He had secured an excellent contract from the
railroad to supply thousands of ties out of the timber of the high
hills. He had made money out of that. And once he had gotten a taste
of money-making, in a business that was his by the traditions of his
people and his own liking, he knew that he had found himself a
career.

He was working now on a far bigger project, the reforesting of thirty
thousand acres of the higher hill country. In time there would be
unlimited money in that. But there was more than money in it. It was a
game and a life which he knew and which he loved. To make money by
making things more abundant, by covering the naked peaks of the hill
country with sturdy, growing timber, that was a thing that appealed to
him.

All the Winter nights he had spent learning the things that men had
done in Germany and elsewhere in this direction, and in adding this
knowledge to what he knew could be done here in the hills. Already he
knew it was being said that he was a young fellow who knew more about
growing timber than any two old men in the hills. And he knew how much
this meant, coming from among a people who are not prone to give youth
more than its due. Already he was being picked as an expert. Next
week he was going down to Albany to give answers to a legislative
committee for the Forest Commission, which was trying to get
appropriations from the State for cleaning up brush and deadfalls from
out of standing timber--a thing that if well done would render forest
fires almost harmless.

He was getting a standing and a recognition which now made that law
school diploma--the thing that he had once regarded as the portal of
the world--look cheap and little.

But, as he sat late that night working on his forestry calculations,
the roadway of his dreams fell away from under him. The high
colour of his ambitions faded to a grey wall that stood before him
and across the grey wall in letters of black he could only see the
word--_g