been class poet and had rather conspicuously avoided athletics during his
entire college course. In pursuing fortune westward Hamilton did not lack
for chroniclers who would not have missed a good story for the want of an
authentic dramatic interpretation of his plans. His uncle, said they, who
had put him through college, was disposed to let him sink or swim by his
own efforts; or, again, he had quarrelled with this same omnipotent uncle
and walked from his presence with no prospects but those within grasp of
his own hand. Again, he had taken the negative of a fair lady more to
heart than two-and-twenty is in the habit of taking negatives. Peter made
no confidences. He went West to punch cows for the Wetmore outfit; he was
a distant connection of the Wetmores through his mother’s side of the
family.

In those days Peter wore his rue—whether for lady fair or for towering
prospects stricken down—with a tinge of wan melancholy not unbecoming to a
gentle aquilinity of profile, softened by the grace of adolescence. His
instinctive aristocracy of manners and taste would have availed him little
with his new associates had he been a whit less manly. But as he shirked
no part of the universal hardship, they left him his reticence. He even
came to enjoy a sort of remote popularity as one who was conversant with
the best—a nonchalant social connoisseur—yet who realized the stern
primitive beauties of the range life.

Judith’s convent upbringing had conferred on her the doubtful advantage of
a gentlewoman’s tastes and bearing, making of her, therefore, an alien in
her father’s house. When Mrs. Atkins, who was responsible for her
education, realized the equivocal good of these things, and saw moreover
that the girl had grown to be a beauty, she offered to adopt her; but
Judith, with the pitiful heroism of youth that understands little of what
it is renouncing, thought herself strong enough to hold together a family,