"And your eyes and skin are clear and you're lean and hard as a race horse. But what a fight! What a fight!" Carl slipped his arm suddenly about the other's broad shoulders. "Come on, Dick," he urged gently. "It's discipline and endurance to-night. I want you to fight this icy wind and grit your teeth against it. Every battle won makes a force furrow in your will." He met Wherry's eyes and smiled with a flash of the irresistible magnetism which somehow awoke unconscious response in those who beheld it. It flamed now in Wherry's clear young eyes, a look of dumb fidelity such as one sees now and then in the eyes of a faithful animal. Such a look had flashed at times in the bloated face of Hunch Dorrigan, in the eyes of young Allan Carmody here at the farm, and--in early manhood when Carl had lazily set a college by the ears--in the eyes of Philip Poynter. It was the nameless force which the faculty had dreaded, for it sent men flocking at the heels of one whose daring whims were as incomprehensible as they were unexpected and original. Young Allan brought the mail in and Carl smilingly tossed a letter to Wherry, who colored and slipped it in his pocket with an air of studied indifference. Carl slit the two directed to himself and rapidly scanned their contents. One was from Ann Sherrill jogging his memory about a promise to come to Palm Beach in January, the other from Aunt Agatha, whose trip to her cousin's in Indiana Carl had encouraged with a great flood of relief, for it had made possible this nine weeks with Wherry at the Glade Farm. Two steps at a time, Wherry bounded up to his room. When he returned he was in better spirits than he had been for months. "Come on, Carl," he exclaimed boyishly. "I'll walk down any gale to-night. And Allan says we're in for a blizzard." Breasting the biting gale, the two men swung out through the snowy lane to the roadway. Carl watched his companion in silence. It was a test--this wind--to see how much of a man had been made from the flabby, drunken wreck he had dragged to the Glade Farm weeks ago with a masterful command. It had been a bitter fight, with days of heavy sullenness on Wherry's part and swift apology when the mood was gone, days of hard riding and walking, of icy plunges after a racking grind of exercise for which Carl himself with his splendid strength inexorably set the pace, days of fierce rebellion when he had calmly thrashed his suffering young guest into submission and locked him in his room, days of horrible choking remorse and pleading when Carl had grimly turned away from the pitiful wreck Starrett had made of his clever young secretary. Once Starrett had motored up officiously to bully Wherry into coming back to him. Carl smiled. Starrett had stumbled back to his waiting motor with a broken rib and a bruised and swollen face. Starrett was a coward--he would not come again.