Dad halted in his long, nervous stride; turned and looked back.
He had reached the highest ground in the lowland region; the top of a low, rolling hillock. Five miles away, in the valley, lay Ideala, the town he had quitted less than an hour and a half earlier.
Under the flood of summer moonlight it lay, it’s ugly lines almost beautiful in the soft radiance.
Dad gazed long and earnestly at the town that had been his home since babyhood; the town whose foremost merchant and leading citizen he had once been; the town that had laughingly witnessed his disgrace and had for fourteen miserable years been the scene of his daily degradation.
He looked back at the place with much the feeling wherewith a released soul might view the twisted and crippled body that had so long been its prison-house.
The disgrace, the sneers, the shame, dulled by liquor—all were things of the past. Ahead—somewhere to the southward—lay a new world, a new career, a new chance under a new name. The shackles had been struck away. The convict was free.
Dad’s keen eyes traced the bulk of a big house on a rise of ground at the town’s northern end. In a room of that house a boy was lying awake, praying for the good fortune of his grandfather. A boy—the only being on earth who loved James Brinton and whom James Brinton loved.
Unwitting his own quick impulse, the man fell heavily to his knees, gripped his hands tight across his chest, and stared up into the moon-illumined sky.
“God bless him and keep him!” he muttered incoherently.
“God bless my little boy and make me halfway the man he thinks I am!”