he
people.

One thing more alone remained to be won to bring him utter happiness.

CHAPTER XXXII

THE RECLUSE

As Weir drove his car homeward through the moonlight, he knew that at
last the dark shadow upon his life had passed forever. Memories
poignant and sad, memories bitter and stern, returned again and again
to his mind; but these henceforth with time would soften and change.
Of these his last visit to his father was most vivid, that day in
spring that had proved their last together....

* * * * *

He had been there with his father for a week, and now must go. He was
chopping wood that morning, with his father looking on. Steele had
cast a measuring glance at the pile of wood cut, then wiped the fine
dew of perspiration from his brow, buried the ax blade in the
chopping-log and seated himself upon a sawn block. A smile shaped
itself upon his lips. Though he never chopped wood now except on these
rare visits to his recluse father's cabin here on the forested
mountain side, his tall lean figure was as tough and wiry as ever, his
arm as tireless, his eye as true to cut the exact line. There was yet
no softening of his fibers or fat on his ribs, and there would be
neither if he had anything to say about it.

From the little Idaho town in the valley below, which he viewed
through the clearing before the cabin, his gaze came around to his
father seated on the doorstep. Taciturn and brooding the latter had
always been, but the pity and sorrow struck at the son's heart as he
perceived what a mere shell of a man now sat there, gray-haired, bent,
fleshless, consumed body and soul by the destroying acid of some dark
secret. Even when a lad Steele Weir had sensed the mystery clouding
his father's life. Like an evil spell it had condemned them to
solitude here in the mountains, until Steele's youth at last rebelled
and he had departed, hungry for schooling, for human society and for a
wider field of action.

What that secret might be he had for years not allowed himself to
speculate. Unbidden at times the memory of certain revealing looks or
acts of his father's floated into his mind:--a dread if not terror
that on occasion dilated the elder man's eyes, and a steadfast driving
of himself at work as if to obliterate painful and despairing
thoughts, and an uneasy, furtive vigilance when forced to visit town.
Once when a stranger, a short heavy-set bearded man, had unexp