ys telling him, sometimes savagely,
sometimes tenderly! "You're too young." What did it mean to him, anyhow,
that he was "too young"? A desolation from which at times he suffered in
secret overcame him.

He was twenty-one or -two--or his memory lied. They had never celebrated
his birthdays, but he was five or six years old when Hugh had been
so suddenly, so unexplainably taken from the house, back there in the
little Eastern college town where they had lived. It was a few months
later that Bella--Cousin Bella, who worked at "the farm"--came for him,
a furtive, desperate Bella with a bruised face--a Bella tight-strung for
flight, for a breaking of the galling accustomed ties of her life, for a
terrible plunge into unknown adventure. She had muttered to him, as
she dressed him and bundled together a few of his belongings, that they
"were going to Hugh"--only it was another name she used, a name since
blotted from their lives.

Hugh had sent for them. She was the only person in the world that Hugh
could trust. But no one must know where they were going. They must be
away by the time the man who took charge of the shop came back in the
morning.

Pete remembered the journey. He remembered the small frontier station
where they left the train at last. He remembered that strange, far-flung
horizon, streaked with dawn, and his first taste of the tangy, heady
air. There had been a long, long drive and a parting with the friendly
driver where Bella turned on to the trail through the woods. It had been
dim and dark and terrible among the endless regiments of trees--mazy
and green and altogether bewildering. And after vague hop-o'-my-thumb
wanderings, he had a disconnected memory of Hugh--a wild, rugged,
ragged, bearded Hugh who caught him up fiercely as though he had an
ogrish hunger for the feel of little boys. It was night when they came
to Hugh's hiding-place. For miles Pete had been carried in his
brother's arms. Bella had limped behind them. There had been a ford,
he remembered; the splashing water had roused Pete, and he stayed awake
afterward until he found himself before a dancing fire of logs in a
queer, dark, resinous-smelling house, very low, with unglazed windows.
He remembered, too, that Bella had burst out crying. That was the
queerest memory of them all--that crying of Bella's.--Even now he could
not understand exactly why she had cried so then.

The frightened, furtive life they had all led since--the life of sc