blame. I met Mary on the roadside once as I went down to the city, and
she told me how the children had been teasing her because she wasn't
pretty, I tried to comfort her with a prophecy that her wonderful eyes
and hair would establish her claims to beauty."

"So it was you, was it?" demanded Tom Burton shortly, "that set her
thoughts upon vanity--well, I don't thank you."

The boy, sitting with every nerve under painful control, felt his breath
come quick and deep until his chest heaved, and words leaped to his lips
which, with a supreme effort, he bit back. This whole intolerable
fallacy of outgrown and hard-shelled narrow-mindedness was spurring him
to outbreak, yet for a moment more he held himself in check.

But to the father the incident of Mary's offending was closed, his mind
was already back with his problem and his next words were a stubborn
reiteration: "Yes, sir, me an' my boys will fight it out here where we
belong."

Suddenly spots of orange and red swam before Ham's eyes. Deep in his
being something snapped, and, as a fuse spark reaches and ignites its
charge, so something fired the eruption that broke volcanically in each
nerve.

He rose suddenly and stood before his father, and his words came with
the molten heat of overflowing lava.

"An' when you've fought yourself to death an' I've fought myself to
death, an' we're both licked, what in hell have we been fightin' for?"