Produced by Roger Frank and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net [Illustration: "IT WAS FOR ME--YOU WENT. DON'T YOU--DIDN'T YOU KNOW IT WAS--JUST BECAUSE OF YOU--THAT I WANTED THEM--AT--ALL?"] ONCE TO EVERY MAN BY LARRY EVANS ILLUSTRATED BY ANTON OTTO FISCHER GROSSET & DUNLAP PUBLISHERS :: NEW YORK Copyright, 1913, by The Metropolitan Magazine Company. Copyright, 1914, by The Metropolitan Magazine Company. Copyright, 1914, by The H. K. Fly Company. TO MINE OWN PEOPLE ILLUSTRATIONS "It Was for Me--You Went. Don't You--Didn't You Know It Was--Just Because of You--That I Wanted Them--At--All?" _Frontispiece_ "Hold Me Tight--Oh! Hold Me Tighter! for They Forgot Me, Too, Denny; They Forgot Me Too!" 53 "Dryad, It's All Right--It's Always Been All Right--With Us! They Lied--They Lied and They Knew They Were Lying!" 85 "What You Need, Gentlemen, Is a Trifle Wider Readin'--Just a Trifle! for You Ain't Bein' Well Posted on Facts!" 149 ONCE TO EVERY MAN CHAPTER I The most remarkable thing about the boy was his eyes--that is, if any man with his spread of shoulder and masculine grace of flat muscled hips could be spoken of any longer as a boy, merely because his years happened to number twenty-four. They, however--the eyes--were gray; not a too light, off-color, gleaming gray, but more the tone of slate, deep when one chanced to find oneself peering deep into them. And they were old. Any spontaneity of youth which might have flashed from them at one time had faded entirely and left a sort of wistful sophistry behind, an almost plaintive hunger which made the pity of his shoulder-stoop--still mercifully only a prophecy of what the next twenty years of toil might leave it--an even more pitiful thing. His sheer bigness should have been still unspoiled; instead it was already beginning to lose its rebound; it was growing imperceptibly slack, like the springy stride of a colt put too soon to heavy harness. Late afternoon was giving way to nightfall--a long shadowed twilight that was heavy with the scent of spring in spite of the scattered patches of wet snow that still lurked in the swamp holes. As the boy stood, facing toward the east and the town that sprawled in the hollow, his great, shoulder-heavy body loomed almost like a painted figure against the cool red background of the horizon. Even in spite of the pike-pole which he grasped in one hand and the vividly checkered blanket coat that wrapped him, the illusion was undeniable. Stripped of them and equipped instead with a high steeple-crowned hat and wide buckled shoes, his long half-saddened face and lean body might have been a composite of all the Puritan fathers who had wrestled with the rock-strewn acres behind him, two hundred years and more before.