“Forgotten you, Professor Thornton?” replied the party addressed, as he shook hands warmly, “forgotten you? no, indeed. I do not need to ask if you are well—and your wife and daughter? Are they both with you?” “Both are in Boston, and well, thank you. Do you remain long in Chicago?” “I leave to-night for the West. Pray convey to your family my remembrances and regards.” “I will not fail to do so.” “The crowd seems to be going, professor; I suppose we must say good-by.” “Good-by, then, and a pleasant journey to you.” CHAPTER II. “The light that shone when hope was born.” In the early dawn of an August day in the year of grace eighteen hundred and ninety-two, David Morning stepped through the French window of his bedroom out upon the broad and sheltered piazza of the railroad station hotel at Tucson, Arizona. A mass of straight brown hair crowned rather than shaded a broad, high brow, over the surface of which thought and time had indented a few lines which gave strength and meaning to the face. Eyes of sea gray hue, as candid and as translucent as the deeps which they resembled, were divided by a nose somewhat too thick at the base for perfect features but running to an aquiline point, with the thin and flexible nostrils of the racer. A short upper lip was covered with a luxuriant chestnut brown mustache, shading a chin which, though long and resolute and firmly upheld against the upper lip, was yet divided by a deep dimple which quivered with sensitiveness. A thick-set but graceful and erect figure, clothed in a suit of dark blue flannel, completed the _tout ensemble_ of the subject of our sketch, who, with thirty-two years of human experience behind him, had stepped five hours before from the West-bound Pullman sleeper. David Morning—the only child of a Connecticut father and a Knickerbocker mother—was born and passed the days of his boyhood in the city of New York, where he was a pupil of the public schools, and where he was making preparation for entering upon a course at Yale, when, at sixteen years of age, the sudden death of his father, followed within a fortnight by that of his mother, compelled him to surrender his studies and seek a means of livelihood.