to those whom the gods have chosen cried to him with the certainty of a herald’s bugle.  “What the greatest have been, you can be!  Of the few to whom impossibility is a jest, you are one!  Nothing can halt your onward march save—­want of opportunity.  You have kinship with the world’s mightiest, but you must go out into the world and claim your own.”  For that was how Ham Burton dreamed.

As the Burton boys came to the farm-house where they had been born, the sun was sinking behind the ragged spears of the mountain-top, and its last fires were mirrored in the lake whose name was like an epitome of their lives—­Forsaken.

The house seemed to huddle in the gathering shadows with melancholic despair.  Its walls looked out over the unproductive acres around it as grimly as a fortress overlooks a hostile territory, and its occupants lived with as defensive a frugality as if they were in fact a beleaguered garrison cut off from fresh supplies.  This was the prison in which Ham Burton must serve his life sentence—­unless he responded to that urgent call which he heard when the others slept.  Tonight he must share with his father the raw chores of the farm, and, when his studies were done, he must go to his bed, exhausted in body and mind, to be awakened at sunrise and retread the cheerless round of drudgery.  Every other tomorrow while life fettered him here held a repetition of just that and nothing more.

The white fire of rebellion leaped mutinously up in Ham’s heart.  He would go away.  He would answer the loud clarion that called to him from beyond the horizons.  The first line of hills should no longer be his remotest frontier.  And if he did that—­a whispering voice of loyalty and conscience argued insistently—­who would wear the heavy harness here at home?  His father would never leave, and upon his father the infirmities of age would some day come creeping.  There was Paul—­but, at the thought of Paul with his strong imagination and his weak muscles, Ham laughed.  If he went away he must go without consent or parental blessing; he must slip away in the night with his few possessions packed in his battered bag.  Very well; if that were the only way, it must be his way.  The voices were calling—­always calling—­and it might as well be tonight.  Destiny is impatient of temporizing.  Yes, tonight he would start out there, somewhere, where the battles were a man’s battles, and the rewards a man’s rewards.

But at the door his mother met him.  There was a moisture of unshed tears in her eyes, and she spoke in the appeal of dependence—­dependence upon her eldest son who had never failed her.

“Son, your father’s in bed—­he’s had some sort of stroke.  He’s feelin’ mighty low in his mind, an’ he says he’s played out with the fight of all these years.  I told him that he needn’t fret himself because we have you.  You’ve always been so strong an’ manly—­even when you were a little feller.  You’d better see him, Ham, an’ cheer him up.  Tell him you can take right hold an’ run the farm.”