“Why shouldn’t I—­anyway?” he cried, with the abandon of a man impatient of all subterfuge.  “Guess I ought to turn right around and ask who the devil you are to look into my affairs?  Who are you to assume the right of inquisitor?” He shook his head.  “But I’m not going to.  Now I’m sane again I know just how much you did for me.  I meant killing Laval.  Oh, yes, there wasn’t a thing going to break my hold until he was dead—­dead.  You got me in time to save me from wrecking my whole life.  And you got in at—­the risk of your own.  If I’d killed him all the things and purposes I’ve worried with since I left college would have been just so much junk; and I’d have drifted into the life of a bum lumber-jack without any sort of notion beyond rye whiskey, and the camp women, and a well swung axe.  You saved me from that.  You saved me from myself.  Well, you’re real welcome to ask me any old thing, and I’ll hand you all the truth there is in me.  I’m an ‘illegitimate.’  I’m one of the world’s friendless.  I’m a product of a wealthy man’s licence and unscruple.  I’m an outcast amongst the world’s honest born.  But it’s no matter.  I’m not on the squeal.  Those who’re responsible for my being did their best to hand me the things a man most needs.  Mind, and body, and will.  Further, they gave me all that education, books, and college can hand a feller.  More than that, my father, who seems to have had more honesty than you’d expect, handed me a settlement of a hundred thousand dollars the day I became twenty-one.  I never knew him, and I never knew my mother.  The circumstances of my birth were simply told me on my twenty-first birthday.  I know no more.  And I care nothing to hunt out those spectres that don’t figger to hand a feller much comfort.  The rest is easy.  I hope I’m a feller of some guts—­”

Father Adam nodded, and his eyes lit.

“Sure,” was all he commented.

“Anyway, I feel like it,” Bull laughed.  “When I learned all these things I started right in to think.  I thought like hell.  I said to myself something like this:  ’There’s nothing to hold me where I am.  There’s no one around to care a curse.  There’s that feeling right inside the pit of my stomach makes me feel I want to make good.  I want to build up around me all that my birth has refused me.  A name, a life circle, a power, a—­anyway, get right out and do things!  Well, what was I going to do?  It needed thinking.  Then I hit the notion.”

He laughed again.  He was gazing in at himself and laughing at the conceits he knew were real, and strong, and vital.

“Say.”  He nodded at the prospect through the doorway.  “There it is.  This country’s beginning.  We don’t know half it means to the world yet.  Well, I hadn’t enough capital to play with, so I resolved right away to start in and learn a trade from its first step to its topmost rung, and to earn my keep right through.  Meanwhile my capital’s lying invested against the time I open out.  I’m