azard of life where to abate the
fight and rest meant to lose the fight and starve.

His heart told him that no other battle-field was hard enough or
desperate enough to spell his defeat. The world was his if he could go
out into the world to claim it, but here in this meager land of
barrenness his soul would strangle without a fight. The things that had
long flamed in his heart had flamed secretly, like a smothered blaze
which gnaws the vitals out of a ship whose hatches are battened down.
He, too, had kept the hatches of silence battened. But through many
wakeful nights the voice that speaks to those whom the gods have chosen
cried to him with the certainty of a herald's bugle. "What the greatest
have been, you can be! Of the few to whom impossibility is a jest, you
are one! Nothing can halt your onward march save--want of opportunity.
You have kinship with the world's mightiest, but you must go out into
the world and claim your own." For that was how Ham Burton dreamed.

As the Burton boys came to the farm-house where they had been born, the
sun was sinking behind the ragged spears of the mountain-top, and its
last fires were mirrored in the lake whose name was like an epitome of
their lives--Forsaken.

The house seemed to huddle in the gathering shadows with melancholic
despair. Its walls looked out over the unproductive acres around it as
grimly as a fortress overlooks a hostile territory, and its occupants
lived with as defensive a frugality as if they were in fact a
beleaguered garrison cut off from fresh supplies. This was the prison in
which Ham Burton must serve his life sentence--unless he responded to
that urgent call which he heard when the others slept. Tonight he must
share with his father the raw chores of the farm, and, when his studies
were done, he must go to his bed, exhausted in body and mind, to be
awakened at sunrise and retread the cheerless round of drudgery. Every
other tomorrow while life fettered him here held a repetition of just
that and nothing more.

The white fire of rebellion leaped mutinously up in Ham's heart. He
would go away. He would answer the loud clarion that called to him from
beyond the horizons. The first line of hills should no longer be his
remotest frontier. And if he did that--a whispering voice of loyalty and
conscience argued insistently--who would wear the heavy harness here at
home? His father would never leave, and upon his father the infirmities
of age would som