But Royal Beaudry had been timid from his childhood.  He had inherited fear.  The shadow of it had always stretched toward him.  His cheeks burned with shame to recall that it had not been a week since he had looked under the bed at night before getting in to make sure nobody was hidden there.  What was the use of blinking the truth?  He was a born coward.  It was the skeleton in the closet of his soul.  His schooldays had been haunted by the ghost of dread.  Never in his life had he played truant, though he had admired beyond measure the reckless little dare-devils who took their fun and paid for it.  He had contrived to avoid fights with his mates and thrashings from the teachers.  On the one occasion when public opinion had driven him to put up his fists, he had been saved from disgrace only because the bully against whom he had turned proved to be an arrant craven.

He remembered how he had been induced to go out and try for the football team at the university.  His fellows knew him as a fair gymnast and a crack tennis player.  He was muscular, well-built, and fast on his feet, almost perfectly put together for a halfback.  On the second day of practice he had shirked a hard tackle, though it happened that nobody suspected the truth but himself.  Next morning he turned in his suit with the plea that he had promised his aunt not to play.

Now trepidation was at his throat again, and there was no escape from a choice that would put a label on him.  It had been his right to play football or not as he pleased.  But this was different.  A summons had come to his loyalty, to the fundamental manhood of him.  If he left David Dingwell to his fate, he could never look at himself again in the glass without knowing that he was facing a dastard.

The trouble was that he had too much imagination.  As a child he had conjured dragons out of the darkness that had no existence except in his hectic fancy.  So it was now.  He had only to give his mind play to see himself helpless in the hands of the Rutherfords.

But he was essentially stanch and generous.  Fate had played him a scurvy trick in making him a trembler, but he knew it was not in him to turn his back on Dingwell.  No matter how much he might rebel and squirm he would have to come to time in the end.

After a wretched afternoon he hunted up Ryan at his hotel.

“When do you want me to start?” he asked sharply.

The little cowpuncher was sitting in the lobby reading a newspaper.  He took one look at the harassed youth and jumped up.

“Say, you’re all right.  Put her there.”

Royal’s cold hand met the rough one of Ryan.  The shrewd eyes of the Irishman judged the other.

“I knew youse couldn’t be a quitter and John Beaudry’s son,” he continued.  “Why, come to that, the sooner you start the quicker.”

“I’ll have to change my name.”

“Sure you will.  And you’d better peddle something—­insurance, or lightning rods, or ’The Royal Gall’ry of Po’try ‘n Art’ or—­”