other influence that moulds the character of men.

Old Jason would easily get well--the colonel himself was surgeon
enough to know that--and he himself dressed and bandaged the
ragged wound that the big bullet had made through one of the old
man's mighty shoulders. At his elbow all the time, helping, stood
little Jason, and not once did the boy speak, nor did the line of
his clenched lips alter, nor did the deadly look in his
smouldering eyes change. One by one the guests left, the colonel
sent Marjorie and Gray to bed, grandmother Hawn sent Mavis, and
when all was done and the old man was breathing heavily on a bed
in the corner and grandmother Hawn was seated by the fire with a
handkerchief to her lips, the colonel heard the back door open and
little Jason, too, was gone--gone on business of his own. He had
seen Steve Hawn's face at the window, his mother had slipped out
on the porch while he was dancing, and neither had appeared again.
So little Jason went swiftly through the dark, over the ridge and
up the big creek to the old circuit rider's house, where the
stream forked. All the way he had seen the tracks of a horse which
he knew to be Steve's, for the right forefoot, he knew, had cast a
shoe only the day before.

At the forks the tracks turned up the branch that led to Steve's
cabin and not up toward his mother's house. If Steve had his
mother behind him, he had taken her to his own home; that, in
Mavis's absence, was not right, and, burning with sudden rage, the
boy hurried up the branch. The cabin was dark and at the gate he
gave a shrill, imperative "Hello!"

In a few minutes the door opened and the tousled head of his