"The daughter hesitated. I imagine she wanted to ask me several things yet,--whether I had cloven feet, for instance, and lived on spiders; but she didn't. She went back to the other three and they moved on. That was the last I saw of them. "I worked the rest of that day, did about three men's work, I remember. That night I drew my pay and went to bed; but I didn't go to sleep. I did a lot of thinking and made up my mind to something. I decided I'd been the under dog long enough. I haven't changed the opinion since. Next day I saw the sun when it was straight overhead and soaked the coal dust out of my skin--as much as possible.... That's all of the fourth stage.... Hadn't I better stop?" The girl shook her head, but still without looking at him. "No; I want to learn what you did after that, after you woke up." "I went West. I hadn't seen the sun or the sky for so long that I was hungry for it. In Omaha I fell in with a bunch of cattlemen and, as I always liked to handle stock, that settled it. I accepted an offer as herder; they didn't call it that, but it amounted to the same. I had a half-dozen ponies, rations for six months, and something under a thousand head of stock to look after. By comparison it wasn't work at all; only I was all alone and it took all the time, day and night. I didn't sleep under a roof half a dozen nights from July to October. When the cattle bunched at night I simply rolled up in a blanket where they were and watched the stars until I forgot them; the next thing I knew it was morning. I had hours to read in though, hours and hours; and that was another thing I was after. For I could read, I wasn't quite illiterate, and I was dead in earnest at last. When the Fall round-up came I quit and went to Denver, and portered in a big hotel and went to night school. "There isn't much to tell after this. I drifted all over the West and the Southwest during the next few years. I got the mining fever and prospected in Colorado and California and Arizona; but I never struck anything. I learned something though; and that was that it isn't the fellow who makes a find who wins, but the chap who buys the prospect, almost invariably. That was useful. Every Winter I landed in a big city and went to school,--night school or mining school or commercial school. Finally it dawned upon me that I was taking the long road to an end, that the short cut was to be really ready to do a thing before making the attempt. I decided to go to a university. That would take years, and meantime I had to live. I could make a living in a little city easier than a big one, so I came here.... You know the rest." Elice Gleason sat up, her fingers locked over her knees. "Yes, I know the rest; but--" She was silent. "But you don't wholly understand," completed the other. "You don't, even yet, do you, Elice?" "No, not entirely, even yet." "Why I can't forget when I wish or help being hard?" "Yes, when you have such infinite possibilities now."