He had choked up under the keen eyes of the Chief. And what angered him most was the look in the Chief's eyes. It was not incredulity; it was merely pity.
At first the papers had it that John Harper Drennen had absconded with fifty thousand dollars of the Eastern Mines Company's money. With rapid investigation came ready amplification of the first meagre details. Drennen's affairs were looked into and it was found that through unwise speculations the man had been skirting on thin ice the pool of financial ruin for a year. The deficit of fifty thousand grew under the microscope of investigation to sixty thousand, eventually to seventy-five thousand.
When at last David Drennen got the back numbers of the papers and locked himself up in his father's library to work his way laboriously through the columns of fact and surmise he was not the same David Drennen who had struck a man in the face for suggesting to him that his father was a thief. Here was the first sign of a weakening of faith; here the first fear which strove wildly to prove itself a shadow. But from shadow emerged certainty. He looked his spectre in the face and it did not dissolve into thin air. When he had done he put his face upon his arms and sobbed. The tardy but crushing sense of his hero's guilt had stricken him; the thought that his father had in no way confided in him, had left him without a word, perhaps without a thought, broke his heart. He was never to be quite the same David Drennen again.
He remained at his father's home through the weary months during which the miserably sordid horror dragged on. One morning he packed into a suitcase the few little articles which he felt were his own. He went out of the house before the others came in; he had no desire to see the home go, as everything else had gone, to pour its handful of golden sand into the great hole which John Harper's ruin had left behind him. It had been almost a year since the first news; and upon the day on which David Drennen set his back to all he knew and his face toward what might come to him, a paper brought the last word. He read it calmly upon the train, wondering at himself that there was such a thing as calm left to him. A man, looking over his shoulder, commented on the news lightly. Drennen didn't answer. He was visualising the final episode dully; the great, masterful body of his own father in the Paris morgue, the ignominious grave, even the cowardly death, self-dealt.
"And he never wrote me," he muttered to himself.
There he was wrong, though he could not know it until months later when the brief letter, forwarded to him by the Chief, reached him. His face had been hard, because his heart was hard, when he read the note which at last John Harper Drennen had written and which, sodden and blurred, was found upon the dead body drawn from the Seine.
"Dear Davy," it had said. "Some day maybe you'll come to forgive me. God dealt me a hard hand to play, boy. Be a man, Davy; for your mother's sake if not for your dad's."
Drennen a year ago would have dropped his face into his hands and would have wept over this letter; now he laughed at it. And the laugh, this first one, was the laugh men came to know as Dave Drennen's laugh. It was like a sneer and a curse and a slap in the face.
The hardest blow the fates could deal him had been delivered mercilessly. But other relentless blows were to come after, and under their implacable, relentless smiting the soul of the man was hardened and altered and made over as is the bit of iron under the blacksmith's hammer. Those characteristics which had been the essentials of the spiritual man of last year were worked over; the fine steel springs of buoyancy were beaten into thin knives of malignancy. That the work might be done thoroughly there was left in him one spark which glowed later on and grew into friendship for a man whom he met far in the north where the Yukon country called to such men as Drennen. The friendship fanned into life a lingering spark of the old generous spirit. Drennen, gambling his life lightly, had won as careless gamblers are prone to do. He made a strike; he trusted his new friend; and his friend tricked, betrayed and robbed him. This blow and others came with the gaunt years. At the end of them David Drennen was the man who sought to quarrel with Kootanie George; he was a man like a lone wolf, hunting alone, eating alone, making his lair alone, his heart filled with hatred and bitterness and distrust. He came to expect the savagery of the world which smote and smote and smote again at him, and he struck back and snarled back, each day finding him a bitterer man than the preceding day had left him. Long before he had turned back from the Yukon to the North Woods, empty handed, empty hearted, men had come to call him "No-luck" Drennen. And as though his ill fortune were some ugly, contagious disease, they shunned him even as invariably as he avoided them.
Men knew him in Wild Cat, two weeks hard going over an invisible trail from MacLeod's; they knew him at Moosejaw, two hundred and fifty miles westward of the Settlement; wherever there was news of gold found he was known, generally coming silently with the first handful of venturesome, restive spirits. But while his coming and his going were marked and while eyes followed him interestedly men had given over offering their hands in companionship. Now and then he moved among them as a man must, but always was he aloof, standing stubbornly apart, offering no man his aid in time of difficulty, flaring into blazing wrath the few times on record when men showed sympathy and desire to befriend him.