had not been without hardship and
danger. He had been raided by Indians and besieged for three days in his
stockaded cabin; he had been invested by wintry drifts of twenty feet of
snow, cut off equally from incoming teams from the pass and the
valley below. During the second year his wife had joined him with four
children, but whether the enforced separation had dulled her conjugal
affection, or whether she was tempted by a natural feminine longing for
the land of promise beyond, she sought it one morning with a fascinating
teamster, leaving her two sons and two daughters behind her; two years
later the elder of the daughters followed the mother's example, with
such maidenly discretion, however, as to forbear compromising herself by
any previous matrimonial formality whatever. From that day Hays had no
further personal intercourse with the valley below. He put up a hotel
a mile away from the farmhouse that he might not have to dispense
hospitality to his customers, nor accept their near companionship.
Always a severe Presbyterian, and an uncompromising deacon of a
far-scattered and scanty community who occasionally held their service
in one of his barns, he grew more rigid, sectarian, and narrow day
by day. He was feared, and although neither respected nor loved, his
domination and endurance were accepted. A grim landlord, hard creditor,
close-fisted patron, and a smileless neighbor who neither gambled nor
drank, "Old Hays," as he was called, while yet scarce fifty, had few
acquaintances and fewer friends. There were those who believed that his
domestic infelicities were the result of his unsympathetic nature; it
never occurred to any one (but himself probably) that they might have
been the cause. In those Sierran altitudes, as elsewhere, the belief
in original sin--popularly known as "pure cussedness"--dominated and
overbore any consideration of passive, impelling circumstances or
temptation, unless they had been actively demonstrated with a revolver.
The passive expression of harshness, suspicion, distrust, and moroseness
was looked upon as inherent wickedness.

The storm raged violently as Hays emerged from the last of a long range
of outbuildings and sheds, and crossed the open space between him and
the farmhouse. Before he had reached the porch, with its scant shelter,
he had floundered through a snowdrift, and faced the full fury of the
storm. But the snow seemed to have glanced from his hard angular figure
as it