and drown in the black water as untouched as though I watched the
drowning of a litter of dirty little kittens."

* * * * *

The next morning when Beaut McGregor pushed his baker's cart along the
street and began climbing the hill toward the miners' cottages, he
went, not as Norman McGregor, the town baker boy, only product of the
loins of Cracked McGregor of Coal Creek, but as a personage, a being,
the object of an art. The name given him by Uncle Charlie Wheeler had
made him a marked man. He was as the hero of a popular romance,
galvanised into life and striding in the flesh before the people. Men
looked at him with new interest, inventorying anew the huge mouth and
nose and the flaming hair. The bartender, sweeping the snow from
before the door of the saloon, shouted at him. "Hey, Norman!" he
called. "Sweet Norman! Norman is too pretty a name. Beaut is the name
for you! Oh you Beaut!"

The tall boy pushed the cart silently along the street. Again he hated
Coal Creek. He hated the bakery and the bakery cart. With a burning
satisfying hate he hated Uncle Charlie Wheeler and the Reverend Minot
Weeks. "Fat old fools," he muttered as he shook the snow off his hat
and paused to breathe in the struggle up the hill. He had something
new to hate. He hated his own name. It did sound ridiculous. He had
thought before that there was something fancy and pretentious about
it. It did not fit a bakery cart boy. He wished it might have been
plain John or Jim or Fred. A quiver of irritation at his mother passed
through him. "She might have used more sense," he muttered.

And then the thought came to him that his father might have chosen the