“I heard of your mother that summer, from a prospector who came up past my camp. He'd wintered in Mountain Home. He told me my own story, the way they had it down there, and what straits your mother was in. I had scraped up quite a few dollars by then, and was thinking how I'd shove it into a bank like an old debt coming to Adam Bogardus. I was studying how I was going to rig it. There wasn't any one who knew me down there, so I felt safe to ventur' a few inquiries. What I heard was that she'd gone home to her folks and was as well off as anybody need be. That broke me all up at first. I must have had a sneakin' notion that maybe some day I could see my way to go back to her, but that let me out completely. I quit then, and I've stayed quit. The only break I made was showin' up here at the 'leventh hour, thinking I could be some use to my son!” “It was to be,” said Paul. “For years our lives have been shaping towards this meeting. There were a thousand chances against it. Yet here we are!” “Here we are!” the packer repeated soberly. “But don't think that I lay any of my foolishness on the Almighty! Maybe it was meant my son should close my eyes, but it's too dear at the price. Anybody would say so, I don't care who.” “But aside from the 'price,' is it something to you?” “More--more than I've got words to say. And yet it grinds me, every breath I take! Not that I wish you'd done different--you couldn't and be a man. I knew it even when I was kickin' against it. Oh, well! It ain't no use to kick. I thought I'd learned something, but I ain't--learned--a thing!” XIII CURTAIN A greater freedom followed this confession, as was natural. It became the basis for lighter confidences and bits of autobiography that came to the surface easily after this tremendous effort at sincerity. Paul found that he could speak even of the family past, into which by degrees he began to fit the real man in place of that bucolic abstraction which had walked the fields of fancy. He had never dared to actuate the “hired man,” his father, on a basis of fact. He knew the speech and manners of the class from which he came,--knew men of that class, and talked with them every summer at Stone Ridge; but he had brooded so deeply over the tragic and sentimental side of his father's fate as to have lost sight of the fact that he was a man. Reality has its own convincing charm, not inconsistent with plainness or even with commonness. To know it is to lose one's taste for toys of the imagination. Paul, at last, could look back almost with, a sense of humor at the doll-like progenitor he had played with so long. But when it came to placing the real man, Adam Bogardus, beside that real woman, once his wife, their son could but own with awe that there is mercy in extinction, after all; in the chance, however it may come to us, for slipping off those cruel disguises that life weaves around us.