his young voice there was both warning and appeal. Adam Gaudylock, he
knew, had spoken to his father, but Gideon had given no sign. Suppose,
no matter _who_ spoke, his father would give, forever, no other sign
than that oft seen and always hated jerk of the head toward the
tobacco-fields?

Gideon Rand took his pipe from his lips. "It's Mr. Jefferson," he
answered laconically. "He's the one man in this country to whom I'd
listen."

Jefferson rode up to the group about the camp-fire, checked his horse,
and gave the tobacco-roller and his son a plain man's greeting to plain
men. The eagerness of the boy's face did not escape him; when he
dismounted, flung the reins of Wildair to his groom, and crossed the bit
of turf to the fire beneath the pines, he knew that he was pleasing a
young heart. He loved youth, and to the young he was always nobly kind.

"Good-evening, Mr. Rand," he said. "You are homeward bound, as I am. It
is good to see Albemarle faces after years of the French. I had the
pleasure of making your son's acquaintance yesterday. It is a great
thing to be the father of a son, for so one ceases to be a loose end and
becomes a link in the great chain. Your son, I think, will do you
honour. And, man to man, you must pay him in the same coin. We on a
lower rung of the ladder must keep our hands from the ankles of the
climbers above us! Make room for me on that log, my lad! Your father and
I will talk awhile."

Thus it was that an able lawyer took up the case of young Lewis Rand. It
was the lawyer's pleasure to give aid to youth, and to mould the mind
of youth. He had many protégés, to all of whom he was invariably kind,