“With the birth of his son there came two heavy blows to John Carlstone. He lost his wife, and her child was cursed with an infirmity that came of a prenatal accident. In moments of stress or high nervous excitement, the boy would be overcome with a strange paroxysm and cry out with the weird, unearthly call of the northern loon. But this son, despite his infirmity and the fact that he inherited a skin the colour of his mother’s race, was the apple of John Carlstone’s eye. He named him Alexander, because, as he told the boy when he grew older, ‘Alexander was a conqueror, and you must conquer all this wild North Shore some day.’ It was a remark that afterwards rang in the consciousness of Alexander Carlstone with all the glamour of prophecy.
“Young Carlstone was from the first a dreamer of wild dreams of power—a boy apart and an albino among his playmates. Timid, studious and extremely sensitive in the beginning, the ridicule of his fellows begot the first bitterness that was later to engulf his whole better nature.
“The elder Carlstone’s wealth grew and grew. He became the owner of a modest fleet of lake boats and a string of inland trading-posts. Dissatisfied with the progress he was making in the crude pioneer school, Carlstone sent his son east to be educated at a private college, where the lad, under a sympathetic teacher, went far and quickly in his studies. He grew to know that he had inherited his father’s initiative and force of character along with an abnormal gift for grasping and visualising situations that baffled the analyses of others. The father planned to make a great merchant or business man of him; the son dreamed of becoming a star on the stage. Young Alexander Carlstone knew that the fire that burned in his veins was the fire of a born protagonist. But he hid this ambition from his father and even his teacher; he felt he must first overcome the affliction that had clung to him since birth.
“While his son was away at school the elder Carlstone married again, this time to the widow of Captain Norman Gildersleeve, who had been master of one of Carlstone’s boats. She was a designing, unscrupulous woman, and she brought with her a son, some years older than Carlstone’s, who inherited all his mother’s malicious and covetous nature. But with John Carlstone’s undying affection for his son, the influence of the Gildersleeves might not have cut much figure in the latter’s life had it not been for a whim of Fate and the Law—the damnable travesty on Justice that men call the Law.”
V
“Young Carlstone had completed what would be the equivalent of a modern public and high school education when one day there came the most unfortunate moment of his life with tidings of the death of his father, the one true friend who believed in him and would have sacrificed all for him right or wrong. The elder Carlstone was drowned out of a canoe during a storm on one of the inland lakes; the wilderness from which he had won affluence and wealth swallowed him.
“That was the crucial turning-point in the life of young Alexander Carlstone, the end of the dramatic career which he had dreamed of—the last chapter in the life of the Man That Might Have Been.
“Owing to the lack of telegraph service across Canada at that time, the news of his father’s passing was almost a week in reaching the young man. The latter was out of funds and none had been sent him. His big-hearted teacher, touched by the anguished grief of his pupil, advanced the cost of his transportation home, though young Carlstone read in his moist old eyes a something that was prescient of worse woes to come.
“Alexander Carlstone arrived at Kam City to find the doors of his father’s house closed against him. Norman T. Gildersleeve, son of the woman who was John Carlstone’s second wife, came out and ordered him off the premises. An altercation followed, in the heat of which Gildersleeve cried:—
“‘Get out of here, you tramp; get out or I’ll send for the provincial police to throw you out! You have no claim here—you are nameless.’