the penalty of the law for
assaulting a white man, but Felix Marchand was in the dust, and that
would do for the moment.

With grim face Ingolby stood over the begrimed figure. "There's the
river if you want more," he said. "Tekewani knows where the water's
deepest." Then he turned and followed Fleda and the woman in black.
Felix Marchand's face was twisted with hate as he got slowly to his
feet.

"You'll eat dust before I'm done," he called after Ingolby. Then, amid
the jeers of the crowd, he went back to the tavern where he had been
carousing.

CHAPTER III. CONCERNING INGOLBY AND THE TWO TOWNS

A word about Max Ingolby.

He was the second son of four sons, with a father who had been a
failure; but with a mother of imagination and great natural strength
of brain, yet whose life had been so harried in bringing up a family on
nothing at all, that there only emerged from her possibilities a great
will to do the impossible things. From her had come the spirit which
would not be denied.

In his boyhood Max could not have those things which lads
prize--fishing-rods, cricket-bats and sleds, and all such things; but
he could take most prizes at school open to competition; he could win in
the running-jump, the high-jump, and the five hundred yards' race; and
he could organize a picnic, or the sports of the school or town--at
no cost to himself. His finance in even this limited field had been
brilliant. Other people paid, and he did the work; and he did it with
such ease that the others intriguing to crowd him out, suffered failure
and came to him in the end to put things right.

He became the village doctor's assistant and dispenser at seventeen
and induced his master to start a drug-store. He made the drug-store a
success within two years, and meanwhile he studied Latin and Greek
and mathematics in every spare hour he had--getting up at five in the
morning, and doing as much before breakfast as others did in a whole
day. His doctor loved him and helped him; a venerable Archdeacon, an
Oxford graduate, gave him many hours of coaching, and he went to the
University with three scholarships. These were sufficient to carry him
through in three years, and there was enough profit-sharing from the
drug-business he had founded on terms to shelter his mother and his
younger brothers, while he took honours at the University.

There he organized all that students organize, and was called in at last
by the Bursar of his col