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?