the intuitive hands that could compel horse-flesh like a magnet. From
her he had inherited a peculiar recklessness and swift daring. From his
father--well, Garrison never liked to talk about his father. His mother
was a memory; his father a blank. He was a good-looking, bad-living
sprig of a straight family-tree. He had met his wife at the New Orleans
track, where her father, an amateur horse-owner, had two entries.
And she had loved him. There is good in every one. Perhaps she had
discovered it in Garrison's father where no one else had.

Her family threw her off--at least, when she came North with her
husband, she gradually dropped out of her home circle; dropped of
her own volition. Perhaps she was afraid that the good she had first
discovered in her husband had been seen through a magnifying-glass.
Her life with Garrison was a constant whirlwind of changing scene and
fortune--the perpetual merry--or sorry--go-round of a book-maker; going
from track to track, and from bad to worse. His friends said he was
unlucky; his enemies, that the only honest thing in him was his cough.
He had incipient consumption. So Mrs. Garrison's life, such as it was,
had been lived in a trunk--when it wasn't held for hotel bills--but she
had lived out her mistake gamely.

When the boy came--Billy--she thought Heaven had smiled upon her at
last. But it was only hell. Garrison loved his wife, for love is not a
quality possessed only by the virtuous. Sometimes the worst man can
love the most--in his selfish way. And Garrison resented the arrival of
Billy. He resented sharing his wife's affection with the boy.

In time he came to hate his son. Billy's education was chiefly
constitutional. There wasn't the money to pay for his education for any
length of time. His mother had to fight for it piecemeal. So he took