"Your education--your training--your blood--they--are--all--that--I can--give you, my son."
"O mother, mother! why did you not tell me before? Why did I not know!" The cry was a protest--an expression of bitterest shame and sorrow.
She smiled. "It--was--all that I could do--for you--my son--the only way--I could--help. I do not--regret the cost. You will--not forget?"
"You promise--to--to regain that--which--your father--"
Solemnly the answer came,--in an agony of devotion and love,--"I promise--yes, mother, I promise."
A month later, the young man was traveling, as fast as modern steam and steel could carry him, toward the western edge of the continent.
He was flying from the city of his birth, as from a place accursed. He had set his face toward a new land--determined to work out, there, his promise--the promise that he did not, at the first, understand.
How he misunderstood,--how he attempted to use his inheritance to carry out what he first thought was his mother's wish,--and how he came at last to understand, is the story that I have to tell.
The Golden State Limited, with two laboring engines, was climbing the desert side of San Gorgonio Pass.
Now San Gorgonio Pass--as all men should know--is one of the two eastern gateways to the beautiful heart of Southern California. It is, therefore, the gateway to the scenes of my story.
As the heavy train zigzagged up the long, barren slope of the mountain, in its effort to lessen the heavy grade, the young man on the platform of the observation car could see, far to the east, the shimmering, sun-filled haze that lies, always, like a veil of mystery, over the vast reaches of the Colorado Desert. Now and then, as the Express swung around the curves, he gained a view of the lonely, snow-piled peaks of the San Bernardinos; with old San Gorgonio, lifting above the pine-fringed ridges of the lower Galenas, shining, silvery white, against the blue. Again, on the southern side of the pass, he saw San Jacinto's crags and cliffs rising almost sheer from the right-of-way.
But the man watching the ever-changing panorama of gorgeously colored and fantastically unreal landscape was not thinking of the scenes that, to him, were new and strange. His thoughts were far away. Among those mountains grouped about San Gorgonio, the real value of the inheritance he had received from his mother was to be tested. On the pine-fringed ridge of the Galenas, among those granite cliffs and jagged peaks, the mettle of his manhood was to be tried under a strain such as few men in this commonplace work-a-day old world are-subjected to. But the young man did not know this.