his flesh and of the law needs must go with him fulsomely eating
out of the gnarled old hand that had half a million to disburse.
He led the way, and no opinion he slyly uttered was preposterous or
impossible enough to draw dissent from his following. Pausing by
the ruined water wheel which he had built from the standing timber,
his face beamed as he gazed across the stretches of Tarwater
Valley, and on and up the far heights to the summit of Tarwater
Mountain--now all his again.

A thought came to him that made him avert his face and blow his
nose in order to hide the twinkle in his eyes. Still attended by
the entire family, he strolled on to the dilapidated barn. He
picked up an age-weathered single-tree from the ground.

"William," he said. "Remember that little conversation we had just
before I started to Klondike? Sure, William, you remember. You
told me I was crazy. And I said my father'd have walloped the tar
out of me with a single-tree if I'd spoke to him that way."

"Aw, but that was only foolin'," William temporized.

William was a grizzled man of forty-five, and his wife and grown
sons stood in the group, curiously watching Grandfather Tarwater
take off his coat and hand it to Mary to hold.

"William--come here," he commanded imperatively.

No matter how reluctantly, William came.

"Just a taste, William, son, of what my father give me often