e righteousness was the righteousness of
stagnation. Now she stood face to face with radical heresy.

"But," she argued with some dumb feeling that she was defending
Divinity, "the Scriptures teach contentment an' it's worldly to be
vain."

"Why not be worldly?" flared the boy with a new and indomitable light in
his eyes. "As for me I'm sick of this life in a place that's
dry-rotting. What I want is the world--the whole of it, good an' bad. I
want what you can win out of fighting. Mary wants to be pretty. Why
shouldn't she? What does any woman get out of life except what men give
her--and what man gives much to the ugly ones?"

"It ain't what men give that's to be counted a prize," came the pious
rejoinder. "It's what heaven gives."

"Heaven gave you a dust-rag and rheumatism. If they suit you, all well
and good. I'm going to see that the world gives Mary what she wants. If
a girl can be made pretty Mary's going to be pretty. It's what a woman's
got a right to want and I'm going to get it for her."

With a violent gesture the boy flung himself from the room and slammed
the door behind him.

Because it was Saturday and there was no school that day, Ham left the
house and turned into the woods. He tramped with his brow drawn and a
hundred insurgent thoughts swirling in his brain.

He passed across hills holding to their final flare of color, where
leaves were drifting down from trees of yellow and crimson. He threaded
alder thickets and passed through groves of silver birches that shivered
fastidiously in the breeze. Wild apple trees raised gnarled branches
under which the "punches" of hooves told of deer that had been feeding.
At last, he came to a clearing where fire had eaten its way and charred
the ruins of the forest. There a large buck lifted its antlered head
among the berry bushes and stood for a moment at startled gaze. But Ham
made no movement to raise the rifle that swung at his side, and as the
red-brown shape disappeared with a soft clatter, the boy did not even
throw a glance after it. He was saying to himself: "William the
Conqueror was a baker's son; Napoleon was the friend of a washer-woman;
Cecil Rhodes was a poor boy--but they didn't stay tied down too long."

Now and again, a rabbit scuttled off to cover, and often with the whir
of drumming wings a grouse rose noisily and lumbered away with spread
tail into the painted foliage. But all the beauty of it was a beauty of
wildness and of nature's