Chapter XI

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.