"Eighteen," Angus replied. "I wish I was older."
The judge looked at him and sighed. "Believe this," he said; "that when you are older—much older—you will wish much more and just as vainly to be eighteen. It's three years before you come of age. Even then—" He broke off and for a moment was silent. "Angus, you are a close-mouthed boy. If in the future you have any trouble with Braden, or if he or anybody else makes you any proposition involving the ranch, will you come to me with it?"
"I'll be very glad to," Angus told him gratefully.
"All right. And, Angus, I'm going to give you a word of advice, which may sound strange from me. Never drink. Never start. Not only not now, but five years hence, nor ten, nor thirty, nor forty."
"I don't intend to," Angus said, in surprise. "I don't think I'd ever drink much. There isn't anything in it, it seems to me."
"You're wrong," the judge told him gravely. "You know nothing about it. In youth there is pleasure in it, and good fellowship that warms the heart, and bright eyes and soft lips—which you know nothing about yet—and dreams of ambition and temporary equality with the gods; and later in life there are the faces and voices of old friends, of men and women dead before their time, and the golden past and golden youth leaps and lives again, and the present is forgotten. And at last—Do you know what there is at last, Angus?"
"No, sir," said the boy with equal gravity. "What is there?"
"Damnation!" the judge replied slowly. "Damnation, deep and living. The damnation of those who knowing the better have chosen the worse; who living the worse can yet see the better and the great gulf fixed between. The hell of the hereafter—phutt!" And the judge snapped his fingers.
The boy stared at him wonderingly. The judge interpreted his thought.
"The gulf is fixed, because the will, which is the only thing that can bridge it, is the first thing to be destroyed. Where there is no will to fight there is no fight. And you think, too, that this advice comes strangely from me. But who can speak with greater authority—I, or the man who never took a drink in his life?"