Discipline in that school was perfect. Jack Brett looked after it. There were two other hulking fellows almost as strong as Jack himself. He thrashed them both soundly before the first week was over, and after that the school went easily along. During that first strenuous week, Jack himself remained each evening to work at his writing. He carried home his slate. There he worked again, covertly, seriously, by lantern light, sitting up until the odd hours of the morning. But on the next Monday he could take his place regularly with the rest of the class.
He asked for no special treatment. Like a bulldog he fastened on his work, and gradually he improved. The example of well-disciplined industry that he exhibited worked well with the others. Small and big, they began to bend to their studies, and, before Christmas came, big hands and small were writing and figuring to the great content of Torridon.
This occupation began to have its reaction upon him. He was no longer a wretched stray, to be scorned by the others. He had become a distinct person, and while no other youth among the clan of Brett would have looked forward to such a task as that of school-mastering, nevertheless Paul Torridon, being unique, was at least respected.
Sometimes he thought that some of their pleasure in his teaching was that they had made a member of another clan, an enemy, their servant, their public servant. But in the meantime, this new-found pride of spirit had even a physical reaction upon him. He grew taller, stronger. His cheeks no longer sank in beneath the cheek bones; there was a trace of hearty color in them. And, at Christmas time, another interest came into his life.
Big Jack, through all the weeks, had been rendering what service he could. Never once had he referred to the first tragic day in the school, nor to the shelter that the schoolmaster had put between him and the wrath of John Brett, but Torridon could feel that the big fellow’s gratitude would never be exhausted.
Several times, at the noon hour and after school, he had offered to teach Torridon how to shoot. But the thin arms and the weak shoulders of Paul could not sway up the massive weight of a rifle and hold it steady. On the last day before Christmas, therefore, Jack had brought to the school a small package, and, when the rest had gone from the school, he unwrapped his parcel and took out an old double-barreled pistol, made light and strong by some good gunsmith. He laid it in the hands of Paul Torridon.
“You can shoot this, Paul,” he said. “Why, even a girl could handle it. It’s like a feather.”
A feather indeed, in his great grasp, but to Paul Torridon it was weight enough. Nevertheless, when he closed his hand upon it, he felt that he had passed through another door and advanced still further into manhood.
There were tears of pleasure in his eyes when he shook hands with Jack. He accepted the small packet of powder and shot. Then Jack gave a little object lesson. He took the big chopping block as a target. Even then, standing not many paces away, he missed it thrice. The fourth bullet lodged in an upper corner, and Jack sighed with relief.
“A rifle’s the gun for me,” he said. “One of these here things, you gotta have nerves like steel to work with ’em. But you, Paul, you could do it. You . . . you can stand up and turn yourself into ice.”
He flushed, making this oblique reference to the first day of school, when Paul had stood up only to be knocked down.
So Paul took his new treasure home.
He looked upon it as the most beautiful thing he ever had seen. The fact that big Jack had missed a target thrice with it showed that it was hard to master. But here was something within his strength, and once a master of the gun, then he would feel a man indeed.
It began a new period in his life. Excalibur to the young Arthur meant no more than this weapon to Paul Torridon.
The Indian border was not far away. The land was filled with rough men. The law of the land was not so strong as the law of guns, and this was a weapon that he could learn to use. He held it in an almost superstitious regard. Every night, his last act, performed with devotional care, was to clean it scrupulously, and through the day it never left him. Jack himself taught him how it could be carried out of sight in a sort of pouch under his left armpit, ready to be drawn. And it seemed that no one suspected that it was with him. Powder and lead were plentiful in the house of John Brett; what he took never was missed, and his practicing was done in the heart of the woods, where the small, hollow echo from the little weapon soon died away.
Yet the shooting of the gun was the smallest part of Paul’s labor. He practiced for hours holding it on a mark. At first it twitched curiously in his nervous hand. But by degrees he learned to steady the nerves, until at last it was held in his fingers as in a rock.
In the three years that followed, he marked time by the progress that he made with the gun, and in the third year, when he walked toward the school over the frosted roads, woe betide the unlucky rabbit that tried to bolt across the way to shelter on the farther side. The pistol glinted into the hand of Torridon, and the rabbit leaped once, and leaped no more.
He had grown taller. Among the gigantic Bretts he was hardly more than a child, but actually he was well above the average. It was not in height that he differed from them so greatly, however, as in the manner of his making. There was hardly a woman or a girl among them with a hand so small, unless it were little Nancy’s. There was hardly a pair of shoulders that would not have made two like his.
But he was not weak. He had not the power that enables a man to lug a heavy pack through the uncertain going of the woods for hours and hours, covering long miles. The lumbering giants of the Brett clan could do this. There was not a man of them who could not hold up his end. But Torridon, of a different blood, had other gifts.
If it came to a foot race—bare feet along the hard, beaten path—he flashed home by himself. Not even big Jack—now passed beyond John Brett’s arbitrary school age—could keep up with the slender youngster. And that quality gave him additional standing, for fleetness of foot is prized in a community where speed of foot may mean the difference between life and death before the possessor is very old.
The massive rifle still was clumsy in his hands; he had an awe of it, but no fondness for its use, and therefore he was shut out from distinction in the most important of all backwoods pursuits. But he could ride a horse. He had no might to crush the ribs of a horse, as the Bretts were apt to do. He had no jaw-breaking power in his hands and arms to check his mount, either. But he learned that touch will do what power will not, and balance will keep the saddle when strong knees are flung to the ground.
So he grew up, light, wiry, nervously exact in his proportions. Beauty, after all, we are apt to judge by utility. In the backwoods, men wanted hands in which a massive axe would quiver like a reed, in which the ponderous iron rifle was a mere toy; to them such hands are beautiful. They wanted shoulders, too, that thought nothing of a hundred-pound pack and a day’s march, in time of need. So such shoulders were a point of beauty, too. They wanted a body of sufficient bulk to match those vital hands and shoulders. So their ideal grew up as naturally as a tree from the ground. But if an artist had been there to scan them, and then turn his eyes to Paul Torridon, he would have had strange things to say, things of which Paul himself was most ignorant. He despised that slender, supple body of his, those quick, light hands. He despised all things about himself except, alone, his knowledge of books, which had made the clan prize him, and his ability with the pistol that, in some distant day, might come to mean much to him.
As for his attitude toward the clan, he accepted them because he knew nothing else.