his education in capsules; receiving a dose in one city and jumping to
another for the next, according as a track opened.

He knew his father never cared for him, though his mother tried her best
to gloze over the indifference of her husband. But Billy understood
and resented it. He and his mother loved in secret. When she died, her
mistake lived out to the best of her ability, young Garrison promptly
ran away from his circulating home. He knew nothing of his father's
people; nothing of his mother's. He was a young derelict; his inherent
sense of honor and an instinctive desire for cleanliness kept him off
the rocks.

The years between the time he left home and the period when he won his
first mount on the track, his natural birthright, Billy Garrison often
told himself he would never care to look back upon. He was young, and
he did not know that years of privation, of hardship, of
semi-starvation--but with an insistent ambition goading one on--are not
years to eliminate in retrospect. They are years to reverence.

He did not know that prosperity, not adversity, is the supreme test. And
when the supreme test came; when the goal was attained, and the golden
sun of wealth, fame, and honor beamed down upon him, little Billy
Garrison was found wanting. He was swamped by the flood. He went the way
of many a better, older, wiser man--the easy, rose-strewn way, big and
broad and scented, that ends in a bottomless abyss filled with bitter
tears and nauseating regrets; the abyss called, "It might have been."

Where he had formerly shunned vice by reason of adversity and poverty
making it appear so naked, revolting, unclean, foreign to his state,
prosperity had now decked it out in her most sensuous, alluring