With slow, cold spite Jacob had tracked his brother's path in life through
its failures. Jacob had no failures, and no life.




V


DISINHERITED

Proud little Emmy, heiress no longer, had put her spirit into her
farm-hand and incited him to the first rebellion of his life. They crossed
the river at night, poling through floating ice, and climbed aboard one of
those great through trains whose rushing thunder had made the girlish
heart so often beat. This was long before the West Shore Line was built.
Neither of them had ever seen the inside of a Pullman sleeper. Emmy could
count the purchased meals she had eaten in her life; she had never slept
in a hotel or hired lodging till after her marriage. Hardly any one could
be so provincial in these days.

Adam Bogardus was a plodder in the West as he had been in the East. He was
an honest man, and he was wise enough not to try to be a shrewd one. He
tried none of the short-cuts to a fortune. Hard work suited him best, and
no work was too hard for his iron strength and patient resolution. But it
broke the spirit of a man in him to see his young wife's despair. Poverty
frightened and quelled her. The deep-rooted security of her old home was
something she missed every day of her makeshift existence. It was
degradation to live in "rooms," or a room; to move for want of means to