n I looked at the nigger thet's dead by now ...
seemed like it was Asa I saw ... with thet lamp glarin' in on him,
daylight and night time alike...." The voice leaped into a soblike
vehemence. "Thet's what Judas money dogged him to! Seemed like ... I
couldn't endure it!"

CHAPTER XVIII

So if the time ever came when Boone stood face to face with Saul Fulton,
it would, for all the amendment of his new life, be a moment of
desperate crisis. The pig iron of his half-savage beginning had been
made malleable and held promise of tempered and flexible steel--but the
metal was still feudist ore. McCalloway comforted himself with the
reflection that Saul was not likely to return, but did not delude
himself into forgetting that strange perversity which seems to draw the
mountaineer inevitably back to his crags and woods, even in the face of
innumerable perils. Some day Saul might attempt to slip back, and Boone
would almost inevitably hear of his coming. Then for a day or an hour,
the lad might relapse into his old self, even to the forgetting of his
pledge. Such an inconsidered day or an hour would be enough to wreck his
life.

Carefully and adroitly, therefore, McCalloway played upon the softer
strings of life, and sometimes, to that end, he opened a hitherto closed
door upon the events of his own life, and let his protege look in on
glimpses that were sacredly guarded from other eyes.

One summer night, for example, Boone laid down a book and said suddenly,
"It tells here about a fellow winning the Star of India and the Victoria
Cross. I'd love to see one of those medals."

Silently McCalloway rose and went over to the folding desk, to come back
with his battered dispatch box. He unlocked it and laid out before the
boy not one decoration, but several. The ribbons were somewhat faded
now, and the metal tarnished; but Boone bent forward, and his face
glowed with the exaltation of one admitted to precincts that are
sacrosanct. For a long while he studied the maltese cross with its
lion-surmounted crown and its supporting bar chased with rose leaves;
the cross that bears the Queen's name, for which men brave death. Beside
it lay the oval, showing Victoria's profile, and the gilt inscription on
a blue enamelled margin: "Heaven's Light Our Guide." A star caught it to
its white-edged blue riband--and that was the coveted Star of India.

Here before his eyes--eyes that burned eagerly--were the priceless
trifles that he