He repeated to himself his new name, his real name:  “Anthony Bard.”  It seemed to make him a stranger in his own eyes.  “Woodbury” had been a name of culture; it suggested the air of a long descent.  “Bard” was terse, short, brutally abrupt, alive with possibilities of action.  Those possibilities he would never learn from the dead lips of his father.  He sought them from his mother, but only the painted mouth and the painted smile answered him.

He turned again to the picture of the house with the snow-topped mountains in the distance.  There surely, was the solution; somewhere in the infinite reaches of the West.

Finally he cut the picture from its frame and rolled it up.  He felt that in so doing he would carry with him an identification tag—­a clue to himself.  With that clue in his travelling bag, he started for the city, bought his ticket, and boarded a train for the West.

CHAPTER VIII

MARTY WILKES

The motion of the train, during those first two days gave Anthony Bard a strange feeling that he was travelling from the present into the past.  He felt as if it was not miles that he placed behind him, but days, weeks, months, years, that unrolled and carried him nearer and nearer to the beginning of himself.  He heard nothing about him; he saw nothing of the territory which whirled past the window.  They were already far West before a man boarded the train and carried to Bard the whole atmosphere of the mountain desert.

He got on the train at a Nebraska station and Anthony sat up to watch, for a man of importance does not need size in order to have a mien.  Napoleon struck awe through the most gallant of his hero marshals, and even the porter treated this little brown man with a respect that was ludicrous at first glimpse.

He was so ugly that one smiled on glancing at him.  His face, built on the plan of a wedge, was extremely narrow in front, with a long, high-bridged nose, slanting forehead, thin-lipped mouth, and a chin that jutted out to a point, but going back all the lines flared out like a reversed vista.  A ridge of muscle crested each side of the broad jaws and the ears flaunted out behind so that he seemed to have been built for travelling through the wind.

The same wind, perhaps, had blown the hair away from the upper part of his forehead, leaving him quite bald half way back on his head, where a veritable forest of hair began, and continued, growing thicker and longer, until it brushed the collar of his coat behind.

When he entered the car he stood eying his seat for a long moment like a dog choosing the softest place on the floor before it lies down.  Then he took his place and sat with his hands folded in his lap, moveless, speechless, with the little keen eyes straight before him—­three hours that state continued.  Then he got up and Anthony followed him to the diner.  They sat at the same table.