. As Anthony Bard he opened once more the
door of the chamber.

He had replaced the revolver of John Bard in the box with the oiled
silk. Now he took it out again and shoved it into his back trouser
pocket, and then stood a long moment under the picture of the woman he
knew was his mother. As he stared he felt himself receding to youth, to
boyhood, to child days, finally to a helpless infant which that woman,
perhaps, had held and loved. In those dark, brooding eyes he strove to
read the mystery of his existence, but they remained as unriddled as the
free stars of heaven.

He repeated to himself his new name, his real name: "Anthony Bard." It
seemed to make him a stranger in his own eyes. "Woodbury" had been a
name of culture; it suggested the air of a long descent. "Bard" was
terse, short, brutally abrupt, alive with possibilities of action. Those
possibilities he would never learn from the dead lips of his father. He
sought them from his mother, but only the painted mouth and the painted
smile answered him.

He turned again to the picture of the house with the snow-topped
mountains in the distance. There surely, was the solution; somewhere in
the infinite reaches of the West.

Finally he cut the picture from its frame and rolled it up. He felt that
in so doing he would carry with him an identification tag--a clue to
himself. With that clue in his travelling bag, he started for the city,
bought his ticket, and boarded a train for the West.

CHAPTER VIII

MARTY WILKES

The motion of the train, during those first two days gave Anthony Bard a
strange feeling that he was travelling from the present into the past.
He felt as if it was not miles that he placed behind him, but days,
weeks, months, years, that unrolled and carried him nearer and nearer to
the beginning of himself. He heard nothing about him; he saw nothing of
the territory which whirled past the window. They were already far West
before a man boarded the train and carried to Bard the whole atmosphere
of the mountain desert.

He got on the train at a Nebraska station and Anthony sat up to watch,
for a man of importance does not need size in order to have a mien.
Napoleon struck awe through the most gallant of his hero marshals, and
even the porter treated this little brown man with a respect that was
ludicrous at first glimpse.

He was so ugly that one smiled on glancing at him. His face, built on
the plan of a wedge, was extremely narrow in