turn out one piece of work that'll last after I'm gone, and last with my signature on it!"
That was fifteen years ago. And for fifteen years he had labored to make Andy a man according to a grim pattern which was known in the Lanning clan, and elsewhere in the mountain desert. His program was as simple as the curriculum of a Persian youth. On the whole, it was even simpler, for Jasper concentrated on teaching the boy how to ride and shoot, and was not at all particular that he should learn to speak the truth. But on the first two and greatest articles of his creed, how Jasper labored!
For fifteen years he poured his heart without stint into his work! He taught Andy to know a horse from hock to teeth, and to ride anything that wore hair. He taught him to know a gun as if it were a sentient thing. He taught him all the draws of old and new pattern, and labored to give him both precision and speed. That was the work of fifteen years, and now at the end of this time the old man pressed his bony shoulders against the wall of the blacksmith shop and knew that his work was a failure.
It came coldly and smoothly home to him as truths which we discover for ourselves are apt to do, or as a poniard point comes easily home to the heart. Jasper felt like that; there was death inside him; but he rolled his cigarette in Mexican style, thin and hard, and smoked it with a masklike face. His life work was a failure, for he had made the hand of Andrew Lanning cunning, had given his muscles' strength, but the heart beneath was wrong.
It was hard to see Andy at the first glance. A film of smoke shifted and eddied through the shop, and Andy, working the bellows, was a black form against the square of the door, a square filled by the blinding white of the
