said to herself finally. "After all, Arthur will merely be doing as
father does. There's _something_ wrong with him, and with me, too, or we
shouldn't think that so terrible." But to Arthur she said nothing.
Encourage him in his present mood she must not; and to try to dissuade
him would simply goad him on.




CHAPTER IV

THE SHATTERED COLOSSUS


That night there was sleep under Hiram Ranger's roof for Mary the cook
only. Of the four wakeful ones the most unhappy was Hiram himself, the
precipitator of it all. Arthur had the consolation of his conviction that
his calamity was unjust; Adelaide and her mother, of their conviction
that in the end it could not but be well with Arthur. For Hiram there was
no consolation. He reviewed and re-reviewed the facts, and each time he
reached again his original conclusion; the one course in repairing the
mistakes of the boy's bringing up was a sharp rightabout. "Don't waste no
time gettin' off the wrong road, once you're sure it's wrong," had been a
maxim of his father, and he had found it a rule with no exceptions. He
appreciated that there is a better way from the wrong road into the right
than a mad dash straight across the stumpy fields and rocky gullies
between. That rough, rude way, however, was the single way open to him
here. Whenever it had become necessary for him to be firm with those he
loved, it had rarely been possible for him to do right in the right way;
he had usually been forced to do right in the wrong way--to hide himself