n easy sense of wasted existence and useless
waiting. He remembered his homeless childhood in the South, where
servants and slaves took the place of the father he had never known,
and the mother that he rarely saw; he remembered his abandonment to a
mysterious female relation, where his natural guardians seemed to
have overlooked and forgotten him, until he was sent, an all too young
adventurer, to work his passage on an overland emigrant train across the
plains; he remembered, as yesterday, the fears, the hopes, the dreams
and dangers of that momentous journey. He recalled his little playmate,
Susy, and their strange adventures--the whole incident that the
imaginative Jim Hooker had translated and rehearsed as his own--rose
vividly before him. He thought of the cruel end of that pilgrimage,
which again left him homeless and forgotten by even the relative he was
seeking in a strange land. He remembered his solitary journey to the
gold mines, taken with a boy's trust and a boy's fearlessness, and
the strange protector he had found there, who had news of his missing
kinsman; he remembered how this protector--whom he had at once
instinctively loved--transferred him to the house of this new-found
relation, who treated him kindly and sent him to the Jesuit school, but
who never awakened in him a feeling of kinship. He dreamed again of his
life at school, his accidental meeting with Susy at Santa Clara, the
keen revival of his boyish love for his old playmate, now a pretty
schoolgirl, the petted adopted child of wealthy parents. He recalled
the terrible shock that interrupted this boyish episode: the news of the
death of his protector, and the revelation that this hard, silent, and
mysterious man was his own father, whose reckless life and desperate
reputation had impelled him to assume a disguise.

He remembered how his sudden accession to wealth and independence had
half frightened him, and had always left a lurking sensitiveness that
he was unfairly favored, by some mere accident, above his less lucky
companions. The rude vices of his old associates had made him impatient
of the feebler sensual indulgences of the later companions of
his luxury, and exposed their hollow fascinations; his sensitive
fastidiousness kept him clean among vulgar temptations; his clear
perceptions were never blinded by selfish sophistry. Meantime his
feeling for Susy remained unchanged. Pride had kept him from seeking the
Peytons. His present visi