Never before had any one called him a wood's-colt. He had never heard the word before, but he knew what it meant. For the first time in his life, he hated his mother. He heard her weeping in the little room they called home. He merely shut his lips tightly and, in spite of the stoicism that was his by nature, the tears swelled up in his eyes.
They were hot tears and he could not shake them off. For the first time the wonder and the mystery of it all came over him. For the first time he felt that he was not as other boys,—that there was a meaning in this lonely cabin and the shunned woman he called mother, and the glances, some of pity, some of contempt, which he had met all of his life.
As he stood thinking this, Richard Travis rode slowly down the main road leading from the town to The Gaffs. And this went through the boy successively—not in words, scarcely—but in feelings:
“What a beautiful horse he is riding—it thrills me to see it—I love it naturally—oh, but to own one!
“What a handsome man he is—and how like a gentleman he looks! I like the way he sits his horse. I like that way he has of not noticing people. He has got the same way about him I have got—that I've always had—that I love—a way that shows me I'm not afraid, and that I have got nerve and bravery.
“He sits that horse just as I would sit him—his head—his face—the way that foot slopes to the stirrup—why that's me—”
He stopped—he turned pale—he trembled with pride and rage. Then he turned and walked into the room where Margaret Adams sat. She held out her arms to him pleadingly.
But he did not notice her, and never before had she seen such a look on his face as he said calmly:
“Mother, if you will come to the door I will show you my father.”
Margaret Adams had already seen. She turned white with a hidden shame as she said: