With a violent gesture the boy flung himself from the room and slammed the door behind him. Because it was Saturday and there was no school that day, Ham left the house and turned into the woods. He tramped with his brow drawn and a hundred insurgent thoughts swirling in his brain. He passed across hills holding to their final flare of color, where leaves were drifting down from trees of yellow and crimson. He threaded alder thickets and passed through groves of silver birches that shivered fastidiously in the breeze. Wild apple trees raised gnarled branches under which the "punches" of hooves told of deer that had been feeding. At last, he came to a clearing where fire had eaten its way and charred the ruins of the forest. There a large buck lifted its antlered head among the berry bushes and stood for a moment at startled gaze. But Ham made no movement to raise the rifle that swung at his side, and as the red-brown shape disappeared with a soft clatter, the boy did not even throw a glance after it. He was saying to himself: "William the Conqueror was a baker's son; Napoleon was the friend of a washer-woman; Cecil Rhodes was a poor boy--but they didn't stay tied down too long." Now and again, a rabbit scuttled off to cover, and often with the whir of drumming wings a grouse rose noisily and lumbered away with spread tail into the painted foliage. But all the beauty of it was a beauty of wildness and of nature's victory over man. For such beauty Ham felt no answer of pulse or heart. Of the cabins he passed, most were empty and those quiet vandals, Weather and Decay, were noiselessly at work wrecking them. Here a door swung askew; there a chimney teetered. Every such tenantless lodging was an outpost surrendered on a field scarred with human defeat; a place where a family had fought poverty and been put to flight. Once he paused and looked down a long slope to a habitation by the roadside. The miserable battle was just ending there, and, though he stood a quarter of a mile away, he stopped to watch the final act. The family that had dwelt there for two generations was leaving behind everything that it had known. John Marrow was at that moment nailing a padlock to the front door, a lock at which the quiet vandals would laugh silently. In a farm wagon was heaped the litter of household effects. These people were whipped, starved out, beaten. Ham Burton turned on his heel and trudged away. His father's farm was little more productive than this one, but his father had that uncompromising iron in his blood that comes from Pilgrim forebears. He would hold on to the end--but to what end and how long? * * * * *