The River Falls times. [volume] (River Falls, Pierce County, Wis.) 1894-1933, 1911-05-25

HE'LL III HlHl, ne approached so near
the ideal standards. He was fine
grained, supple, slender, small-jointed,
thoroughbred from head to heel
Intellectually, he had been good
enough to go through the academy at
West Point with credit, and to grad
uate high enough i'll his class to be
assigned to service in the cavalry. His
standards OF conduct, his ideas of hon
or and morality had been about the
same as those of the best third of his
classmates. If his fellow officers in
the philippines, during the year or
two he spent in the service, had been
asked to pick flaw in him, which
they would have been reluctant to do,
they would have said that he seemed
to them bit too thin-skinned and
rather fastidious; that was what his
chum and only intimate friend, Perry
Hunter. said about him at any rate.
But he could afford to be fastidi-
GUS, for he had about all man could
| want, one would think. For three
/ generations they had taken wealth
for granted in the Cay1ey family, and
/ with it had come breeding security
/ OF social position, simplicity and ease
! in making friends, both among men
and women. In short, there could be
no doubt at all that up to his twenty
ninth year Fate had been ironically
kind to Philip Cayley. She had given
him no hint, no preparation for the
stunning blow that was to fall upon
him. suddenly, out of so clear a sky.
When it did fall, it cut his life
clean across; so that when he thought
back to that time now, it seemed to
him that the Lieutenant Cayley of the
United States army had died over
there in the Philippines, and that he,
the man who was now soaring in those
great circles through the arctic sky,
was chance inheritor of his name
and of his memory.
He had set out one day at the head
of a small scouting party, the best
liked man in the regiment, secure in
the. respect, in the almost fatherly re
gard, of his colonel, proudly conscious
of the almost idolatrous admiration
of his men and the younger officers.
He had gone out believing that no
one ever had a truer friend than he
possessed in Perry Hunter, his class
mate at West Point, his fellow officer
in the regiment, the confdant of all
his hopes and ideals.
He had come back, after fort
nights absence, to find his name
smeared with disgrace, himself judged
and condemned, unheard, in the opin-
ion of the mess. And that was not
the worst of it. The same blow which
had deprived him of the regard of the
only people in the world who matter
ed to him, destroyed, also, root and
branch, his affection for the one man
of whom he had made an intimate.
The only feeling that it would be pos
sible for him to entertain for Perry
Hunter again must be a Multiplying,
half-incredulous contempt. And If
that was his feeling for the man he
had trusted most and loved the most
deeply, what must be it for the rest of
humankind? What did it matter what
they thought of him or what they did
to him? All he wanted of human So
ciety was to escape from 1t.
He fell to wondering, as he hung, |
suspended, over that rosy expanse OF
feecy fog, whether, were the thing to
do over again, he would act as he had |
acted five years ago; whether he
would content himself with a single |
disdainful denial of the monstrous
thing they charged him with; whether |
he would resign again, under fire, and |
go away, leaving his furnished name |
for the davis to peck at.
Heretofore he had always answered |
that question with fierce af1rma-.
tive. Today it left him wondering. |
Had he stayed, had he paid the price |
that would have been necessary to |
clear himself, he would never have |
found his wings, so much was clear.
He would never have spent those
four years in the wilderness, working,
experimenting taking his life in his
hands, day after day, while he master
ed the art that no man had ever mas
tered before.
He had set himself this task because
it was the only one he knew that did
not involve contact with his fellow
beings. He must have something that
he could work at alone. Work and
solitude were two things that he had
felt an overmastering craving for. And
the possibility he had faced with
light heart every morning-the posi-
bility of a sudden and violent death
before night, had been no more to
him than an agreeable spice to the
days work
1t was not until he had actually
learned to fly, had literally shaken the
dust of the earth from his feet and
taken to the sky as his abode, that his
wound had healed. The three months
that he had spent in this upper arctic
air, awning for 16 hours out Of "a, had
Gained him, put his nerves in tune
again; given him for men and their
affairs quiet Indifference, in place
of the smarting contempt he had been
hugging to his breast before. Three
months ago, at sight of those little
human dots crossing the glacier, he
WO1lH have MI oJnff and