“It’s a common enough story, Jim. I was born in Toronto. There were four of us, my dad, my mother, my little sister Margery and myself. A happier quartette no one ever heard of. But my mother died suddenly. To my mind, she took all the fun of life with her. Dad moved us to Texas, where he became engaged in some mining or oil projects. A year after my mother’s death, he married again. I did not understand a thing about it, until he told me I had a new mother. In a fit of boyish resentment, I packed my clothes together, took my small hoard of savings, went into my little sister’s bedroom one night as she lay asleep, kissed her, cried over her, and ran away.
“Silly, Jim,––wasn’t it? But from that day to this I have not seen a relative of mine.
“I worked my way north, back into Canada, to Campbeltown, where I remembered having visited the Brenchfields as a little fellow with my mother. Brenchfield’s mother and mine had been school companions in the old days. I had had a good time on that earlier visit and the memory of it, more than anything else, prompted me to make for Campbeltown again.
“Mrs. Brenchfield showed me every kindness and made a home for me. She or her husband must have sent word to my dad, who evidently decided to let me cool my heels. He mailed me a draft for three hundred dollars and promised a further hundred dollars a month for my keep and education during the time I preferred to deny myself of the pardon and loving welcome that would await me any time I cared to return home. That was where the mistake was made. Jim, he should have insisted on my being returned home at once and when I got home he should have given me a right good hiding.
“I indignantly returned his draft and wrote him declining all aid from one whom I, in my juvenile heroics, felt I could no longer respect as a father.
“Gee!––what fools we are sometimes! And how often have I longed and ached to hear from my dear old dad again! But I was proud, and I fear I am still a little that way.
“I was thrown into the constant companionship of Graham Brenchfield and despite our great dissimilarity in make-up and his three years’ advantage over me in age, we got on well together. He was different then.
“The Brenchfields educated me, as they did Graham. I put it all down, for a long time after, to the great goodness of their hearts, but I have had every reason to believe lately that they were secretly in receipt of that hundred dollars a month which I so dramatically declined from my dad. I feel certain now that it was my stay with the Brenchfields that so materially aided them in the education of their own, for they had little enough money in their own right for educational purposes.
“I pulled up on Graham at school and in a few years we were ready to start out to conquer the world. It was then that we decided on the Great Adventure to the Golden West, in search of fame and chiefly fortune.