At the same time I found angles to him.  I sensed a ruthlessness in him.  I saw him as a fearless and sleepless antagonist, but always open and fair.  There was only once when his nature broke ground and revealed something of his inner self, something of a sensitiveness which suffers for subtler things and penetrates to finer understandings.  This was when he was telling me of the effect of his uncle’s broken promise to educate him.  He had suffered deeply for this; and he was sure his whole life would be influenced by it.  It had stirred all the reserve ambition and power of his nature.  It had thrown him forward in a redoubled determination to overcome the default, to succeed in spite of the lost opportunity.

Hence he had read many books.  He had studied the history of America, and other countries as well.  His mind ran to statecraft.  He thought of nothing else.  He sensed men as groups—­thinking, desiring, trading, building—­and for these ends organized into neighborhoods, villages, cities, and states.  His genius, even then, was interested in using these groups for progressive ends, such as he had in view.  He was a super-man who sees empires of progress and achievement for the race through the haze of the unformed future, and who takes the responsibility of carving that future out and of forcing history into the segment that his creative imagination has opened.  He would guide and make the future, while serving men.

Here he was then just past twenty-one, born on April 23d, the reputed birthday of Shakespeare; young, and yet old with a maturity with which he was invested at his entrance into the world.  He was in every way a new type to me.  We were mutually drawn to each other.  I knew that his courage could never stoop to littleness.  His integrity, even when his judgment might err, seemed to me an assured quality of nature.  As for me, he doubtless thought that I was one of the coming men of the community.  Whatever I was, I was dependable.  If I should become attached to him he could rely upon me in case of need.  This, I think, made him regard me at this early stage of our friendship as a person not to be neglected in his business of creating adherents.  When I spoke to him in terms of wonder and congratulation of his defeat of Wyatt, he took it with a smile and as a matter of course.  He had found it an easy thing to rout Wyatt.  Wyatt had stirred his fighting blood; and everything pertinent to the discussion had come to his mind in the heat of the debate....

And now we began to hear the sound of a fiddle, scraped in a loose and erratic fashion and giving forth an occasional note of a tune.  I looked around and saw Lamborn sitting in the doorway of the hut.  Zoe was near him, laughing at his half-drunken attempts to manage the instrument.  Douglas looked up.  A quick smile shot across his face.  He glanced into my eyes in a searching manner which mystified me and sent a sudden thrill through me.  What