followed when, an orphan and without a home, he had sailed away
from New Orleans to the Cape. How the mind of the mathematician,
which he had inherited from the Boston schoolmistress, had been
swayed by the spirit of the soldier, which he had inherited from
his father, and which led him from the mines of South Africa to
little wars in Madagascar, Egypt, and Algiers. It had been a
life as restless as the seaweed on a rock. But as he looked
back to its poor beginnings and admitted to himself its later
successes, he gave a sigh of content, and shaking off the mood
stood up and paced the length of the veranda.

He looked up the hill to the low-roofed bungalow with the palm-
leaves about it, outlined against the sky, and as motionless as
patterns cut in tin. He had built that house. He had built it
for her. That was her room where the light was shining out from
the black bulk of the house about it like a star. And beyond the
house he saw his five great mountains, the knuckles of the giant
hand, with its gauntlet of iron that lay shut and clenched in the
face of the sea that swept up whimpering before it. Clay felt a
boyish, foolish pride rise in his breast as he looked toward the
great mines he had discovered and opened, at the iron mountains
that were crumbling away before his touch.

He turned his eyes again to the blazing yacht, and this time
there was no trace of envy in them. He laughed instead, partly
with pleasure at the thought of the struggle he scented in the
air, and partly at his own braggadocio.

``I'm not afraid,'' he said, smiling, and shaking his head at the
white ship that loomed up like a man-of-war in the black waters.