“What, what, what! The last one left him,--run off with one of his men! What a fool the man must be. Can't he look after his women folks better than that? Better have lost her with the others. Two boys, and Chrissy, and the girl--and now the last girl gone off with his hired man. Poor Chrissy! Guess she had about enough of it. Things have come out pretty much even, after all! There was more love and lickin's wasted on Abe. Father was proudest of him, but he couldn't break him. Hi! but I've crawled under the woodshed to hear him yell, and father would tan him with a raw-hide, but he couldn't break him; couldn't get a sound out of him. Big, and hard, and tough--Chrissy thought she knew a man; she thought she took the best one.” With slow, cold spite Jacob had tracked his brother's path in life through its failures. Jacob had no failures, and no life. V DISINHERITED Proud little Emmy, heiress no longer, had put her spirit into her farm-hand and incited him to the first rebellion of his life. They crossed the river at night, poling through floating ice, and climbed aboard one of those great through trains whose rushing thunder had made the girlish heart so often beat. This was long before the West Shore Line was built. Neither of them had ever seen the inside of a Pullman sleeper. Emmy could count the purchased meals she had eaten in her life; she had never slept in a hotel or hired lodging till after her marriage. Hardly any one could be so provincial in these days. Adam Bogardus was a plodder in the West as he had been in the East. He was an honest man, and he was wise enough not to try to be a shrewd one. He tried none of the short-cuts to a fortune. Hard work suited him best, and no work was too hard for his iron strength and patient resolution. But it broke the spirit of a man in him to see his young wife's despair. Poverty frightened and quelled her. The deep-rooted security of her old home was something she missed every day of her makeshift existence. It was degradation to live in “rooms,” or a room; to move for want of means to pay the rent. She pined for the good food she had been used to. Her health suffered through anxiety and hard work. She was too proud to complain, but the sight of her dumb unacceptance of what had come to her through him undoubtedly added the last straw to her husband's mental strain. * * * * * “It is hard for me to realize it as I once did,” said Paul, as the story paused. “You make tragedy a dream. But there is a deep vein of tragedy in our blood. And my theory is that it always crops out in families where it's the keynote, as it were.” “Never mind, you old care-taker! We Middletons carry sail enough to need a ton or two of lead in our keel.” “But, you understand?”-- “I understand the distinction between what I call your good blood, and the sort of blood I thought you had. It explains a certain funny way you have with arms--weapons. Do you mind?”