Her family threw her off—­at least, when she came North with her husband, she gradually dropped out of her home circle; dropped of her own volition.  Perhaps she was afraid that the good she had first discovered in her husband had been seen through a magnifying-glass.  Her life with Garrison was a constant whirlwind of changing scene and fortune—­the perpetual merry—­or sorry—­go-round of a book-maker; going from track to track, and from bad to worse.  His friends said he was unlucky; his enemies, that the only honest thing in him was his cough.  He had incipient consumption.  So Mrs. Garrison’s life, such as it was, had been lived in a trunk—­when it wasn’t held for hotel bills—­but she had lived out her mistake gamely.

When the boy came—­Billy—­she thought Heaven had smiled upon her at last.  But it was only hell.  Garrison loved his wife, for love is not a quality possessed only by the virtuous.  Sometimes the worst man can love the most—­in his selfish way.  And Garrison resented the arrival of Billy.  He resented sharing his wife’s affection with the boy.

In time he came to hate his son.  Billy’s education was chiefly constitutional.  There wasn’t the money to pay for his education for any length of time.  His mother had to fight for it piecemeal.  So he took his education in capsules; receiving a dose in one city and jumping to another for the next, according as a track opened.

He knew his father never cared for him, though his mother tried her best to gloze over the indifference of her husband.  But Billy understood and resented it.  He and his mother loved in secret.  When she died, her mistake lived out to the best of her ability, young Garrison promptly ran away from his circulating home.  He knew nothing of his father’s people; nothing of his mother’s.  He was a young derelict; his inherent sense of honor and an instinctive desire for cleanliness kept him off the rocks.

The years between the time he left home and the period when he won his first mount on the track, his natural birthright, Billy Garrison often told himself he would never care to look back upon.  He was young, and he did not know that years of privation, of hardship, of semi-starvation—­but with an insistent ambition goading one on—­are not years to eliminate in retrospect.  They are years to reverence.

He did not know that prosperity, not adversity, is the supreme test.  And when the supreme test came; when the goal was attained, and the golden sun of wealth, fame, and honor beamed down upon him, little Billy Garrison was found wanting.  He was swamped by the flood.  He went the way of many a better, older, wiser man—­the easy, rose-strewn way, big and broad and scented, that ends in a bottomless abyss filled with bitter tears and nauseating regrets; the abyss called, “It might have been.”