she used to agonize over a fear that father had come back and the keeper
had withheld the letter and belied her to him with some devilish story
that maddened him and drove him from her. Such a fancy might have come out
of her mental state at that time. I believe that Granger left the letter
simply to satisfy her. He must have believed my father was dead. He could
not have conceived of a man's being lost in that broad country at that
season; but my father was a man of hills and farms, all small, compact.
The plains were another planet to him.

"The letter was found in the keeper's clothing after his death; no one
ever came to claim it of his successor. Somewhere in this great wilderness
a tired man found rest. What would we not give if we knew where!

"And she worked in a hotel in Mountain Home. Can you imagine it! Then
Christine was born and the multiplied strain overcame her. Strangers took
care of her children while she lay between life and death. She had been
silent about herself and her past, but they found a letter from one of her
old schoolmates asking about teachers' salaries in the West, and they
wrote to her begging her to make known my mother's condition to her
relatives if any were living. At length came a letter from
grandfather--characteristic to the last. The old home was there, for her
and for her children, but no home for the traitor, as he called father.
She must give him up even to his name. No Bogardus could inherit of a Van
Elten.

"She had not then lost all hope of father's return, and she never forgave
her father for trying to buy her back for the price of what she considered
her birthright. She settled down miserably to earn bread for her children.
Then, when hope and pride were crushed in her, and faith had nothing left
to cling to, there came a letter from Uncle Jacob, the bachelor, who had