d out at the injustice of it. The principal
had seized upon the truancy as an excuse to let him escape from an
investigation of the cause of the fight. Ned Merrill got off because his
father was a rich man and powerful in the city. He, Jeff, was whipped
because he was an outcast and had dared lift his hand against one of his
betters.

And there was no redress. It was simply the way of the world.

Jeff and his mother were down that afternoon to see their new friend
off in the _City of Skook._ Captain Chunn found a chance to draw the boy
aside for a question.

"Is it all right with Mr. Webber? What did he do?"

"Oh, he gave me a jawing," the boy answered.

The little man nodded. "I reckoned that was what he would do. Be a
good boy, Jeff. I never knew a man more honorable than your father. Run
straight, son."

"Yes, sir," the lad promised, a lump in his throat.

It was more than ten years before he saw Captain Chunn again.

Part 2

As an urchin Jeff had taken things as they came without understanding
causes. Thoughts had come to him in flashes, without any orderly
sequence, often illogically. As a gangling boy he still took for granted
the hard knocks of a world he did not attempt to synthesize.

Even his mother looked upon him as "queer." She worried plaintively
because he was so careless about his clothes and because his fondness
for the outdoors sometimes led him to play truant. Constantly she set
before him as a model his cousin, James, who was a good-looking boy,
polite, always well dressed, with a shrewd idea of how to get along
easily.

"Why can't you be like Cousin James? He isn't always in trouble," she
would urge in her tired way.

It was quite true that the younger cousin was more of a general favorite
than harum-scarum Jeff, but the mother might as well have asked her boy
to be like Socrates. It was not that he could not learn or that he did
not want to study. He simply did not fit into the school groove. Its
routine of work and discipline, its tendency to stifle individuality, to
run all children through the same hopper like grist through a mill, put
a clamp upon his spirits and his imagination. Even thus early he was a
rebel.

Jeff scrambled up through the grades in haphazard fashion until he
reached the seventh. Here his teacher made a discovery. She was a faded
little woman of fifty, but she had that loving insight to which all
children respond. Under her guidance for one year the boy blo