Destiny | Page 5

fresh supplies. This was the prison in which Ham
Burton must serve his life sentence--unless he responded to that urgent
call which he heard when the others slept. Tonight he must share with
his father the raw chores of the farm, and, when his studies were done,
he must go to his bed, exhausted in body and mind, to be awakened at
sunrise and retread the cheerless round of drudgery. Every other
tomorrow while life fettered him here held a repetition of just that and
nothing more.
The white fire of rebellion leaped mutinously up in Ham's heart. He
would go away. He would answer the loud clarion that called to him
from beyond the horizons. The first line of hills should no longer be his
remotest frontier. And if he did that--a whispering voice of loyalty and
conscience argued insistently--who would wear the heavy harness here
at home? His father would never leave, and upon his father the
infirmities of age would some day come creeping. There was Paul--but,
at the thought of Paul with his strong imagination and his weak muscles,
Ham laughed. If he went away he must go without consent or parental
blessing; he must slip away in the night with his few possessions
packed in his battered bag. Very well; if that were the only way, it must
be his way. The voices were calling--always calling--and it might as
well be tonight. Destiny is impatient of temporizing. Yes, tonight he

would start out there, somewhere, where the battles were a man's
battles, and the rewards a man's rewards.
But at the door his mother met him. There was a moisture of unshed
tears in her eyes, and she spoke in the appeal of
dependence--dependence upon her eldest son who had never failed her.
"Son, your father's in bed--he's had some sort of stroke. He's feelin'
mighty low in his mind, an' he says he's played out with the fight of all
these years. I told him that he needn't fret himself because we have you.
You've always been so strong an' manly--even when you were a little
feller. You'd better see him, Ham, an' cheer him up. Tell him you can
take right hold an' run the farm."
Ham turned away a face suddenly drawn. A lemon afterglow hung
above the hills, and where it darkened into the evening sky, a single
star shone in a feeble point of light. It was setting--not rising--and to
the boy it seemed to be his star.
"I'll go in and see him," he said curtly.
Thomas Burton lay on his bed with his face turned to the wall. When
his son entered, he raised it and shifted it so that the yellow light of an
oil lamp shone on it above the faded quilt.
It was a hopeless, beaten face, and for the first time in his life Ham saw
the calloused hand which crept out to his own shake feebly.
He took it, and the father said slowly:
"Ham, somehow I feel like an old hoss that just goes as long as he can
an' then lays down. Right often he don't get up no more. It's a hard fight
for a boy to take up, this fight with rocks and poor soil, but I guess
you'll have to tackle it. I didn't quit so long as I could keep goin'."
The boy nodded. He composed his face and answered steadily: "I guess
you can depend on me."

But outside by the barn fence he set down his milk-pail a few minutes
later and in the coming night his face twitched and blackened.
"So after all," Ham told himself bitterly, "I've got to stay."
He reached out mechanically and began loosing the top bar from its
sockets, while he called in the cows to be milked. So many times had
he taken down and put up that panel of bars that his hands knew from
habit every roughness and knot in every rail.
"Mornin' an' evenin' for three hundred and sixty-five days a year;" the
boy said to himself in a low and very bitter voice. "That makes seven
hundred and thirty times a year I do this same, identical thing. I ain't
nothin' more than servant to a couple of cows." He stood and watched
the two heifers trot through the opening to the water-trough by the
pump. "By the time I'm thirty-five," he continued, "I'll do it fourteen
thousand and six hundred times more--When Napoleon was
thirty-five--" But there he broke off with an inarticulate sound in his
browned young throat that was very like a groan.
CHAPTER II
Mary Burton was eleven. Of late, thoughts which had heretofore not
disturbed her had insistently crept into the limelight of consciousness.
One morning as she stood, dish-towel in