conceive of no superior between him and Almighty God. One autumn
day in 1794 Gaston was out shooting with his youngest brother,
John, their father's favorite. Gaston's gun was caught by a
creeper, was torn from him; and his hand, reaching for it,
exploded the charge into his brother's neck. His brother fell
backward into the swamp and disappeared.

Gaston plunged into the wilderness--to Tennessee, to Kentucky, to
Indiana.


"And it's my turn," said Hampden Scarborough as he ended a
brief recital of the ancestral murders which Pauline had drawn
from him--they were out for a walk together.

"Your turn?" she inquired.

"Yes--I'm the great-grandson--the only one. It's always a
great-grandson."

"You DO look dangerous," said Pauline, and the smile and the
glance she sent with the words might have been misunderstood by a
young man entertaining the ideas which were then filling that
young man's brain.

Again, he told her how he had been sent to college--she was
always leading him to talk of himself, and her imagination more
than supplied that which his unaffected modesty, sometimes
deliberately, more often unconsciously, kept out of his stories.