“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.”
“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.’
“A presentiment of just what his dark words meant staggered Carlstone for the moment. ‘Say that again!’ he defied.