“A presentiment of just what his dark words meant staggered Carlstone for the moment. ‘Say that again!’ he defied.
“‘I’ll say it,’ mocked the other. ‘You are a nobody, and in the eyes of the Law you are not John Carlstone’s heir. Your mother was merely his squaw mistress.’
“At that taunt, young Carlstone saw all red. He bore down upon Gildersleeve with the fury of a savage and struck as his fighting father would have struck. Gildersleeve went over before a terrific blow that laid his cheek open below the right eye. When he struggled to his feet he was knocked down again with a similar smash under the left optic. As he lay upon the ground, his face covered with blood, Carlstone stood over him uttering the terrible cry that since infancy had afflicted him in moments of high excitement.
“In his blind fury, young Carlstone might have finished for good the usurper of his birthrights had it not been that passersby intervened. As it was, he left two scars upon the face of Norman T. Gildersleeve that he was to carry all his life.”
Josephine Stone shuddered. It was not altogether at the recital of the details of the fight, but at remembrance of those very scars beneath the eyes of the man she had seen with Louis Hammond that night on the transcontinental train. She did not interrupt, however, as Acey Smith proceeded:
“Alexander Carlstone was placed under arrest and tried before the district magistrate on a charge of felonious assault with intent to kill. The district attorney was a fair man, and in view of the provocation, reduced the charge to common assault and battery. The magistrate, a born snob and the voluntary creature of the now powerful Gildersleeve family, imposed a fine of fifty dollars, in default of which young Carlstone was to spend six months in jail.
“Staunch old friends of John Carlstone came to the rescue of his unfortunate son. They engaged a lawyer to defend him, and when he was sentenced, they supplied his fine that he might not have to bear the further ignominy of spending a term in jail. They even went further and started to raise a fund to defray the legal expenses of a fight for his rights in the courts.
“But it turned out that what Norman T. Gildersleeve had said was based on the Law—the Law which was made to crush the souls of the unfortunate and to protect the smug hypocrites who revere it and Gold as their established gods. John Carlstone’s first marriage to an Indian chief’s daughter, under the red man’s rites, was not recognised by Church or State; the son therefore was nameless and had no rights under the Constitution. The further fact that John Carlstone had neglected to make a will left the younger Carlstone’s case hopeless.
“Alexander Carlstone fled from the haunts of civilisation, filled with a consuming bitterness of spirit, an atheist so far as garbled Justice and revamped Christianity were concerned and nursing an undying hatred for the usurper, Norman T. Gildersleeve.
“In his soul had been sown the self-same germs that have bred history’s bloodiest revolutions.”