tly
selfish proposition I'm making, Harwood; it simply gets down to this,
that I need your help."

"Of course, Mr. Bassett; if I can serve you in any way--"

"Anything you can do for me you may do if you don't feel that you will
be debasing yourself in fighting under my flag. It's a black flag, they
say--just as black as Thatcher's. I don't believe you want to join
Thatcher; the question is, do you want to stick to me?"

Bassett had spoken quietly throughout. He had made no effort to play
upon Harwood's sympathies or to appeal to his gratitude. He was, in
common phrase, to be taken or let alone. Harwood realized that he must
either decline outright or declare his fealty in a word. It was in no
view a debatable matter; he could not suggest points of difference or
even inquire as to the nature of the service to be exacted. He was face
to face with a man who, he had felt that night of their first meeting at
Fraserville, gave and received hard blows. Yet he did not doubt that if
their relations terminated to-day Bassett would deal with him
magnanimously. He realized that after all it was not Bassett who was on
trial; it was Daniel Harwood!

He saw his life in sharp fulgurations; the farm (cleared of debt through
Bassett's generosity, to be sure!) where his father and brothers
struggled to wrest a livelihood from reluctant soil, and their pride and
hope in him; he saw his teachers at college, men who had pointed the way
to useful and honorable lives; and more than all, Sumner rose before
him--Sumner who had impressed him more than any other man he had ever
known. Sumner's clean-cut visage was etched grimly in his consciousness;
verily Sumner would not have dallied with a man of Bassett's ilk. He had
believed when he left college that Sumner's teaching and example would
be a buckler and shield to him all the days of his life; and here he
was, faltering before a man to whom the great teacher would have given
scarce a moment's contemptuous thought. He could even hear the
professor's voice as he ironically pronounced upon sordid little despots
of Bassett's stamp. And only forty-eight hours earlier he had been
talking to a girl on the campus at Madison who had spoken of idealism
and service in the terms of which he had thought of those things when he
left college. Even Allen Thatcher, in his whimsical fashion, stood for
ideals, and dreamed of the heroic men who had labored steadfastly for
great causes. Here was his chance now