There had been no fuss made over Jasper Holt when he was born. They
handed him an honored name from some fierce old warrior of a
forebear, relegated him to a fourth-story back nursery with a trained
nurse, and left him to himself.
His mother paused long enough before returning to her interrupted
social career to look him over, declare that he had nice eyes and she
believed his hair was going to curl; then she was swallowed up in the
world from which she had reluctantly stepped aside. She had little
use for a son except to dress him in velvets and Lord Fauntleroy
collars and make of him a toy to amuse her guests. Until he reached
that stage she saw very little of him.
Of his stern father he saw less. He was immersed in business. He
was rich, but what of that? He had to make more riches to keep the
social whirl fed.
The baby had a face and form worth noticing, even in his first days.
The great blue eyes that had attracted his mother's flitting
attention, could be gray sometimes, and had in them depths of light
and wisdom that fairly startled his practical nurse. He had the brow
of a philosopher, and gold hair rippled around the fine little head
like a halo. The old warrior-namesake must have bestowed upon him
that firm chin beneath the cupid's bow of the lips, and surely an
angel had lent him that smile!
But as he grew older there came into his eyes a wistfulness that was
almost pathetic at times. He was an affectionate child, quite
embarrassing his cold, reserved nurse with his demonstrations, but
winning the utmost devotion always from all who had to serve him.
He was not a good boy in the conventional acceptation of the word.
He sweetly and serenely had his own way in everything from the time
he could walk and talk. He would neither eat what he did not like,
nor wear what he did not fancy. He did not take kindly to his
mother's velvets and curls and lace collars. He always disappeared
hopelessly when made ready for a dress parade. He would fight any
bully on the back street who undertook to cheat the little lame
newsboy, and he was always trying to take the part of some weak dog
or child. He could run down the street with the swiftness of a
swallow, his pockets full of sharp stones, and hit every electric
light in the block as he ran, and he was forever taking the blame
frankly of all the broken windows and looted garden plots in the
neighborhood. In these days his acquaintance with his father was
limited to severe interviews in which stern threats and scathing
reprimands mingled with a galling sarcasm were dealt abundantly. It
was as his clear eyes looked steadily, unafraidly, into the angry
steel ones of the man that his young face hardened, his warrior-chin
took a firm set, and the light in his face was deadened by a stab of
pain. He was growing wise and losing his faith in the love he had
taken for granted in both father and mother. It was at that time
that he lived mostly upon the street, and companioned with boys of
the rougher class. No one but his nurse knew it, and she but seldom.
She was only too glad to have the time off duty.
It was when they discovered a childish plot in the neighborhood to
mob the president of a defaulting bank in which the hard-working
parents of some of his playmates had lost their all, that Jasper was
taken hold of by the law as leader and financier of the whole
enterprise. Bravely, proudly, he took the whole blame, exonerating
the other boys, and declaring himself instigator of the affair.
His father paid a heavy fine to hush it up and took his son in
charge. A merciless whipping was the beginning of that interview
between them, which the son received like a gentleman. But when it
was over he lifted reproachful eyes, steadied his quivering
warrior-chin and said determinedly: "But all the same, father, I
think I was right! That man had been stealing those poor people's
money!"
The father looked at the little son with the unbroken will and swore!
He took away the cheap little firearms that the boy had purchased
with his allowance for himself and the other boys, and he declared
the allowance should cease until such time as the boy would own to
his fault and come to his senses. One isn't just quite sure, but,
perhaps after all, the removal of his allowance was the very best
thing that father ever did for his little, lonely son who had begun
so early to reform the world with a high hand.
Jasper went up to his room and thought. Then he went out and
consulted with a newsboy friend of his, and presently he was
established on a paper route of his own. For several weeks he sold
papers till he had enough money to replace his lost revolver. Then
he was satisfied and retired from business for the time, but this was
not his first business venture, and his father began to discover that
the threat of taking away the allowance had no effect whatever on his
determined young son.
Yet in spite of his bravery and strength, in spite of his high
purposes and anarchistic tendencies, there was in the boy's nature a
great wealth of love and a desire to be loved. He was, in his
younger days, forever throwing his arms about his beautiful mother's
neck and kissing her to her great disgust and the severe detriment of
her complexion; until finally he became shy about showing his
affection, and the lines of loneliness and yearning grew deeper about
the young mouth.
It was the time he ran away that made him sure that no one cared for
him.
Jasper had been up before the paternal tribunal for some trivial
offense, and his word had not been taken in explanation, against the
word of his younger brother--who had arrived on the scene some three
years later than himself, and through some strange fantasy of
selfishness was the beloved darling of his mother.
Perry Holt had sharp little effeminate features like his mother's,
and had been petted and spoiled from the moment his whimsical mother
first saw him. If there was any trouble Perry was usually at the
bottom of it and Jasper was blamed for it, because Jasper was "so
queer" and "so wild" and "always getting into trouble and doing what
he ought not to do." That was the way his mother put it. And so she
had ordered Jasper to his father's den for a reprimand for something
Perry really had done, and Jasper's word was doubted!
He took his punishment silently and went to his room and his bed,
where he lay motionless staring into the darkness. If he had been a
girl he might have sobbed, so hurt was his soul; but being Jasper he
held back the stinging tears that burned his eyes and stared hard
into the dark. At midnight, when the servants were asleep, he arose
and stole softly from the house before his mother and father had
returned from some social function they were attending.
He stayed away three days, companioning with waifs who had no homes,
and then his homesick heart brought him back again with longing to
see his mother. He reached the house at early dusk and found his
mother and Perry getting into the car to ride to the station where
they were to meet his father and take a pleasure trip to Washington
for a few days! They had not even missed him and were going off
without knowing where he was! His mother looked at him with disgust
and told him to go into the house and wash his face, that he "looked
a perfect fright"; and then the car whirled off and left him gazing
after his dream of what a mother ought to be.
After that Jasper never expected anything more from his mother or his
family. He began to see that life was meant to be a lonely job and
it "was up to him" how it turned out. He seemed to grow up and be
wise beyond his years in that few seconds that he stood gazing after
the car vanishing in the dusk.
When it was discovered that he was spending most of his time on the
street in the company of newsboys and working men's sons, he was
fitted out expensively and sent away to boarding school where he
began a lively career. Those who understood him adored him, but they
were few, and were mostly confined to small boys and the working
class. The little boys in the school followed him like flies after
molasses and obeyed him abjectly. The teachers dreaded and feared
and hated him almost to a man, with the exception of now and then a
woman who had an unusual amount of fine instinct and saw the yearning
for love in his eyes.
From school to school he went, out of one scrape into another, yet no
one stopped to enquire what it was all about or to discover that
almost every trouble he got into was for the sake of someone else, or
some real principle. That his efforts at reform were against the
rules of the school, and could therefore but fail, made no difference
to him. He went right on setting things right as far as he could and
then taking the consequences. He saw the futility of his efforts and
sometimes clenched his sturdy fists and thought of the future when he
should be able to "lick" those unfair teachers who couldn't see that
they were letting some fellows go scot free who were more to blame
than the ones who were punished. Some day he would be bigger than
they, and then he would back up his protests with a strength that
could not be gainsaid. And so he went on fighting bullies who were
bigger than himself and who did not hesitate to put the whole story
in a good light for themselves; and taking the consequences in such a
way that when he left a school the principal had beneath his open
relief a troubled undertone of smallness, and of feeling that, after
all, the boy had got the better of him, for there had been the look
of a conqueror in Jasper's eye as he parted from him at the station.
Somehow he got himself through with his preparatory studies and was
allowed to pass on. It surely was not from any great scholastic
attainments, for he never bothered himself to learn lessons that he
did not care for, nor to recite them after he had learned them, and
examinations meant nothing at all to him. If he chose to take one he
did so, and then spoiled the whole paper by some erratic tirade of
his own on some special question; or else took the whole thing as a
joke. If he did not choose to take an examination he calmly sat
through the allotted time intent upon his own thoughts and handed in
no paper at the close. His teachers raved and ranted. They punished
and they threatened. But Jasper went calmly on and did as he
pleased; and strange to say in all that checkered career there were
but two teachers who understood, the soul with whom they had to deal,
and could lead him like a lamb by a mere smile or word to do the
hardest tasks. For those two he slaved, not because he saw any
reason in their demands always, but because he desired to please
them, for they had proved themselves what he called "square."
Nevertheless he had acquired through it all a most marvellous and
varied amount of knowledge. Nothing escaped him. He never forgot
anything he heard, and the classes through which he had sat,
perpetrating many of his jokes upon the teachers, had all left their
impress upon him. What he had heard the other students recite, that
he knew. If you began to quote a line of poetry which had been
studied in English class he would promptly finish it and, when he
chose, tell you much about the author. His teachers would have been
amazed if they could have heard him. And often when another fellow
took a high rank in the class in mathematics it had been Jasper who
had showed him how to work his problems--problems that he had not
taken the trouble to work out for himself.
"Why should I?" he once answered a troublesome principal who was
admonishing him about preparing his lessons, "I get what I need out
of them, and that's all that's necessary, isn't it? It's my
education, isn't it? My teacher isn't getting any good out of my
writing out all that junk, is he? It isn't doing him any good, why
should I take the trouble?"
And this was his hopeless attitude whenever he had to deal with
teachers whom he did not reverence.
In college he was much the same, only that it did not matter there so
much. There were more men and he was less under authority. It was
expected that he should have some independence. Yet even here he was
mixed up in a great many of the troubles. Finally, in his third
year, his college career came to a sudden and final ending in the
midst of a disgrace that was not his own, but which he took upon his
own sturdy shoulders to save another youth who had a widowed mother
dependent upon him, and must get through college before he could
support her. Whether or not his action was justified by the
following chapters of that weak and careless youth's life is not a
part of this story to tell. It may be that Jasper himself learned
some lessons by the disgrace he took upon himself and the lightness
with which the real criminal accepted his sacrifice. However that
may be, Jasper's mother, by that time an attractive widow, was so
thoroughly outraged by her son's behavior--she never knew, of course,
that he himself had not been at fault--that she drove him from his
home in scorn and contempt.
Hurt to the heart the boy obeyed; too proud to explain; knowing she
would be but the angrier if she knew the truth; knowing there was no
mother heart in her for him, nor ever had been.
He went straight to the great, wide, free west, and roamed for a year
from one place to another restlessly, still expecting some day to
return when his mother should feel differently. Then he saw in the
papers the notice of her marriage to a man he never had liked, and so
he settled down on the claim he had already taken, and built up
around his young, lonely life a something which he called home.
Gradually the outcasts of society had been drawn to him for help or
comfort in dire need and peril from the law; and always he had
sympathy with any who were without the pale of the respectable world,
even though in no other way could he feel anything congenial about
them. His home came to be the refuge for sinners, and because their
crimes were many and his hearth was wide, their sins were fastened to
him in name if not in deed; as when a child he bore the blame for
others and himself grew strong.
He built them rude dwellings on his land, and some he chose to be his
trusted ones. One by one he tested them and found them true to him
and to his few simple principles of life. Sternly he ruled them, and
greatly did they love and reverence their boy leader, and were proud
to follow him. If one of them transgressed again he was dealt with
justly; and once a body swayed and hung stark against the sky in
justice for a deed of shame. It was this memory that Scathlin held
and feared, although it had happened long before he came to take
refuge from some petty deed of his. Scathlin had never entered the
closer brotherhood of men who guarded Holt's own private quarters.
His place had been upon the outer edge of things. He was not
trusted--never had been--and knew he was not trustworthy. So it was
that he dreaded going back to those relentless men, who, if they once
found out that he had robbed their leader of valuable property and
betrayed him into the hands of an enemy who had long looked with
hungry eyes at the rich silver mine and abundant water supply that
were his, would stop at nothing till justice had been done upon his
contemptible head. But by that same honor that made men love and
serve him, old Scathlin knew that Holt had not yet told his men about
his loss of the wallet, nor whom he suspected.
This was Jasper Holt, and this his story up to the time that he met
Jean and laid his roses at her threshold.