The reasons why went too deep within him to be easily seen. In the first place, it was adventure--and Bruce's life had not been very adventurous heretofore. It was true that he had known triumphs on the athletic fields, and his first days at a great University had been novel and entertaining. But now he was going to the West, to a land he had dreamed about, the land of wide spaces and great opportunities. It was not his first western journey. Often he had gone there as a child--had engaged in furious battles with outlaws and Indians; but those had been adventures of imagination only. This was reality at last. The clicking rails beneath the speeding train left no chance for doubt. Then there was a sense of immeasurable relief at his sudden and unexpected freedom from the financial problems his father had left. He would have no more consultations with impatient creditors, no more would he strive to gather together the ruins of the business, and attempt to salvage the small remaining fragments of his father's fortune. He was free of it all, at last. He had never known a darker hour--and none of them that this quiet, lonely-spirited man had known had been very bright--than the one he had spent just before going to bed earlier that evening. He had no plans, he didn't know which way to turn. All at once, through the message that Barney had brought him, he had seen a clear trail ahead. It was something to do, something at last that mattered. Finally there remained the eminent fact that this was an answer to his dream. He was going toward Linda, at last. The girl had been the one living creature in his memory that he had cared for and who cared for him--the one person whose interest in him was real. Men are a gregarious species. The trails are bewildering and steep to one who travels them alone. Linda, the little "spitfire" of his boyhood, had suddenly become the one reality in his world, and as he thought of her, his memory reviewed the few impressions he had retained of his childhood. First was the Square House--the orphanage--where the Woman had turned him over to the nurse in charge. Sometimes, when tobacco smoke was heavy upon him, Bruce could catch very dim and fleeting glimpses of the Woman's face. He would bend his mind to it, he would probe and probe, with little, reaching filaments of thought, into the dead years--and then, all at once, the filaments would rush together, catch hold of a fragment of her picture, and like a chain-gang of ants carrying a straw, come lugging it up for him to see. It was only a fleeting glimpse, only the faintest blur in half-tone, and then quite gone. Yet he never gave up trying. He never quit longing for just one second of vivid remembrance. It was one of the few and really great desires that Bruce had in life.