Destiny | Page 7

ones?"
"It ain't what men give that's to be counted a prize," came the pious
rejoinder. "It's what heaven gives."
"Heaven gave you a dust-rag and rheumatism. If they suit you, all well
and good. I'm going to see that the world gives Mary what she wants. If
a girl can be made pretty Mary's going to be pretty. It's what a woman's
got a right to want and I'm going to get it for her."
With a violent gesture the boy flung himself from the room and
slammed the door behind him.
Because it was Saturday and there was no school that day, Ham left the
house and turned into the woods. He tramped with his brow drawn and
a hundred insurgent thoughts swirling in his brain.
He passed across hills holding to their final flare of color, where leaves
were drifting down from trees of yellow and crimson. He threaded
alder thickets and passed through groves of silver birches that shivered
fastidiously in the breeze. Wild apple trees raised gnarled branches
under which the "punches" of hooves told of deer that had been feeding.
At last, he came to a clearing where fire had eaten its way and charred
the ruins of the forest. There a large buck lifted its antlered head among
the berry bushes and stood for a moment at startled gaze. But Ham
made no movement to raise the rifle that swung at his side, and as the
red-brown shape disappeared with a soft clatter, the boy did not even
throw a glance after it. He was saying to himself: "William the
Conqueror was a baker's son; Napoleon was the friend of a
washer-woman; Cecil Rhodes was a poor boy--but they didn't stay tied
down too long."
Now and again, a rabbit scuttled off to cover, and often with the whir of
drumming wings a grouse rose noisily and lumbered away with spread

tail into the painted foliage. But all the beauty of it was a beauty of
wildness and of nature's victory over man. For such beauty Ham felt no
answer of pulse or heart.
Of the cabins he passed, most were empty and those quiet vandals,
Weather and Decay, were noiselessly at work wrecking them. Here a
door swung askew; there a chimney teetered. Every such tenantless
lodging was an outpost surrendered on a field scarred with human
defeat; a place where a family had fought poverty and been put to flight.
Once he paused and looked down a long slope to a habitation by the
roadside. The miserable battle was just ending there, and, though he
stood a quarter of a mile away, he stopped to watch the final act. The
family that had dwelt there for two generations was leaving behind
everything that it had known. John Marrow was at that moment nailing
a padlock to the front door, a lock at which the quiet vandals would
laugh silently.
In a farm wagon was heaped the litter of household effects. These
people were whipped, starved out, beaten. Ham Burton turned on his
heel and trudged away. His father's farm was little more productive
than this one, but his father had that uncompromising iron in his blood
that comes from Pilgrim forebears. He would hold on to the end--but to
what end and how long?
* * * * *
That Saturday afternoon, Mary was walking along the sandy road that
led to the village. She had no purpose, except to be alone, and she
carried an old fashion paper which she meant to con. This newly
discovered necessity of beauty was a very serious affair, and since she
meant to devote herself to its study she conceived that these pages
should give tidings from the fountain head.
She did not expect to meet anyone, and she was quite content to spend
that Indian-summer afternoon with her companions of the printed page.
These were beautiful ladies, appareled in the splendid vogues of Paris
and Vienna. There were delightful bits of information concerning some
mysterious thing called the haute monde and likewise pictures that

instructed one how to dress one's hair and adorn the coiffure with
circlets of pearls. Mary's sheer delight in such mysteries was not
marred by any suspicion that the text she devoured told of fashions
long extinct and supplanted by newer edicts.
On the great rock which jutted out from the wooded tangle into the
margin of Lake Forsaken, with lesser sentinel rocks about it, she sat
cross-legged until she glanced up at last to see that the west was
kindling, and that she must start back to the duller realities of home.
She had been interrupted by no break in the silence except the little
forest twitter of birds and now and then the cool splash where a bass
leaped