For the first time in his life, however, Dan seemed anxious to meet with approval. When he told the gang his opinions, they listened respectfully, for did not Dan Birge have hip-boots and a bicycle with a coaster brake, to say nothing of unlimited spending money and permission—cruel, unjust world!—to skip school and go swimming whenever he liked! True, there were things Dan Birge did not have—he had no mother, no one to take care of him when he was sick, no home—but boys did not analyze these things. They only knew that Dan Birge and his father lived at the Hotel Button like real travelling-men, and young Dan wore better clothes and swore more profusely and had his own way more than any one else in the Corners. His father, rough, shaggy-haired, black-eyed pirate that he was, feared by all, treated this only child as something to be revered and indulged to the point of absurdity. He was the only human being Dan Birge had ever loved, for he had not loved the frail little woman who had taken his name—and his tempers—borne his son and died with a faint sigh of relief. Some claimed there was Indian blood in Dan Birge. The ancestor discovering the lake had been a trapper and hunter, and many said this ancestor’s wife was no less than a Mohawk squaw. Certain it was that Dan’s graceful self, with dark eyes and olive skin and the mop of blue-black hair which would not “stay put,” could have been called proof of the rumor, also his loyal, generous actions towards the few he liked, and the cold-blooded revenge he executed towards an enemy. As for the Birge temper, surely it suggested tomahawks, scalping and being burnt at the stake, with its relentless whirlwind of expression once roused. Dan Birge’s father had the sense to know he was a madman when he was in a rage and he would lock himself in a room, because he was not responsible for his actions, and wait until the spasm had been expended. His son Dan, having had little to rouse his temper, had not yet been forced to such a procedure. Something in the boy’s dignified manner, a deviation from his father’s blustering self, would indicate that young Dan’s temper could remain at white heat, influencing his actions almost to madness long after his father’s more dramatic rage had died away and humiliating remorse set in. There was, as well, a superstition about the fate of a woman who would marry a Birge, for all the Birges’ wives, excepting the rumored squaw, had been adoring, meek individuals who lived until they bore a son and then died, leaving some one else to bring him up! Dan had been raised by Submit Curler, Oyster Jim, Ali Baba, Betsey Pilrig, Hopeful Whittier—and himself. He began domineering over his father, as a new tyrant always wins easily over an old one, before he was a year old. At three the Corners looked aghast at his antics, and shivered at his vocabulary.