He repeated to himself his new name, his real name: "Anthony Bard." It
seemed to make him a stranger in his own eyes. "Woodbury" had been a
name of culture; it suggested the air of a long descent. "Bard" was
terse, short, brutally abrupt, alive with possibilities of action. Those
possibilities he would never learn from the dead lips of his father. He
sought them from his mother, but only the painted mouth and the painted
smile answered him.

He turned again to the picture of the house with the snow-topped
mountains in the distance. There surely, was the solution; somewhere in
the infinite reaches of the West.

Finally he cut the picture from its frame and rolled it up. He felt that
in so doing he would carry with him an identification tag--a clue to
himself. With that clue in his travelling bag, he started for the city,
bought his ticket, and boarded a train for the West.




CHAPTER VIII


MARTY WILKES

The motion of the train, during those first two days gave Anthony Bard a
strange feeling that he was travelling from the present into the past.
He felt as if it was not miles that he placed behind him, but days,
weeks, months, years, that unrolled and carried him nearer and nearer to