Upon the summit of Cater's Beam, some ninety years ago, a member of that ancient and noble clan sat mounted, gazed into the far-spreading valley beneath him and saw that it was good and green. Thereupon he held his quest accomplished, and determined here to build himself a sure abode, that his cadet branch of the Malherb race might win foothold on the earth, and achieve as many generations of prosperity in the future as history recorded of his ancestors in the past. Seen a mile distant, sharp eyes upon that August day had marked a spot creep like a fly along the crest of Cater's Beam, crawl here and there, sink down to Fox Tor, and remain stationary upon its stony side for a full hour. Observed closely, one had watched a man at the crossroads of life--a man who struggled to mould his own fate and weave the skein of his days to his own pattern. Here he sat on a great bay horse and pursued the path of his future, as oblivious to its inevitable changes and chances as he was to a black cloud-ridge that now lifted dark fringes against the northern sky and came frowning over the Moor against the course of the wind. Maurice Malherb was close on fifty, and he had chosen to plough the earth for his partage in the world's work. A younger son of his house, he had turned from the junior's usual portion, and, by some accident of character, refused a commission and sought the peaceful occupations of agriculture. He had already wasted some portion of his patrimony upon land near Exeter; and he was seeking new outlet for his energies when arose a wide-spread ardour for cultivation of Dartmoor. The age of enterprise dawned there; "newtake" tenements sprang up like mushrooms upon this waste; and a region that had mostly slept since Elizabethan miners furrowed its breast and streamed its rivers for tin, awoke. As a grim crown to the Moor, Prince Town and its gigantic War Prison was created; while round about young woods budded, homesteads appeared, and wide tracts of the Royal Forest were rented to the speculative and the sanguine.