Destiny | Page 4

an
extremely solid wall; on his right an equally impassable fence; on his
left his implacable brother and at his front--nothing but the Marquess
kid.
Of the four obstacles Jimmy seemed the most vulnerable, and upon him
Paul hurled himself with the exalted frenzy of a single idea: an idea of
boring his way out of an insupportable position. That Jimmy's blows
hurt him so little astonished him, and under the spur of fear he fought
with such abandon that to Ham's face came a slow grin of contentment
and to that of the Marquess kid an expression of pained amazement,
followed by one of sudden panic. Of this particular mouse, the cat had
had enough and amid jeers of derision the cat withdrew with more of
haste than of dignity in his departure.
But five minutes later as Paul trudged along the forest path toward his
home, the unaccustomed light of battle that had momentarily kindled in
his eyes began to fade. There glowed in them no such lasting triumph
as should come from a boy's first victory. Instead, they wore again the
far-away look of dreamy pensiveness. Already, his thoughts were back
in their own world, a world peopled with fancies and panoplied with
imaginings. Suddenly he halted, and threw back his head, intently
listening. High and far away came the honking cry of wild geese in
flight; travelers of the upper air-paths, winging their way southward.
Distance softened the harshness of their journeying clamor into a note
of appealing wanderlust.
Paul's lips were parted and his eyes aglow. The memory of the fight he
had dreaded was effaced; the bruises on his sensitive face were

forgotten. His heart was drinking an elixir through his ears, and at the
sounds floating down from the heights new fancies leaped within him.
Ham with his eyes shrewdly fixed upon his brother swung his books to
his other hand and shrugged his shoulders. He, too, was looking in
fancy beyond the misty hills, but not to the flight of geese. He saw
cities with shaft-like structures biting the sky and dark banners of
smoke floating above the clash of conflict. His heart was burning to be
at the center of that conflict.
He, too, heard a song of sirens, but it was such a song as Richard
Whittington heard when bare-footed in Pauntley the notes of the Bow
bells stole out to him:
"Sang of a city that was blazoned like a missal-book, Black with oaken
gables, carven and inscrolled; Every street a colored page, every sign a
hieroglyph, Dusky with enchantments, a city paved with gold."
Then he gazed about the desolate country where morning wore to night
in a sequence of hard chore upon hard chore, and he groaned between
his set teeth.
Here and there along the way stood deserted houses where the wind
searched the interiors through the eyeless sockets of unglazed windows
and where the roof-trees were broken and twisted. They were blighting
symbols of this soul-breaking existence in a land of abandoned farms
where Opportunity never came. They were mutely eloquent of
surrender after struggle. They summed up the hazard of life where to
abate the fight and rest meant to lose the fight and starve.
His heart told him that no other battle-field was hard enough or
desperate enough to spell his defeat. The world was his if he could go
out into the world to claim it, but here in this meager land of barrenness
his soul would strangle without a fight. The things that had long flamed
in his heart had flamed secretly, like a smothered blaze which gnaws
the vitals out of a ship whose hatches are battened down. He, too, had
kept the hatches of silence battened. But through many wakeful nights
the voice that speaks to those whom the gods have chosen cried to him

with the certainty of a herald's bugle. "What the greatest have been, you
can be! Of the few to whom impossibility is a jest, you are one!
Nothing can halt your onward march save--want of opportunity. You
have kinship with the world's mightiest, but you must go out into the
world and claim your own." For that was how Ham Burton dreamed.
As the Burton boys came to the farm-house where they had been born,
the sun was sinking behind the ragged spears of the mountain-top, and
its last fires were mirrored in the lake whose name was like an epitome
of their lives--Forsaken.
The house seemed to huddle in the gathering shadows with melancholic
despair. Its walls looked out over the unproductive acres around it as
grimly as a fortress overlooks a hostile territory, and its occupants lived
with as defensive a frugality as if they were in fact a beleaguered
garrison cut off from