Williams news., 1921-04-22
Prologue.

If one can just lie close enough to the
 breast of the wilderness, he can't hell
 but be imbued with some of the life tha
 pulses therein.-From a Frontiersman't
 Diary
 Long ago, when the great city of
 Gftcheapolis was a rather small, un-
 tidy hamlet in the middle of a plain,
 it used to be that a pool of water.
 possibly two hundred feet square,
 gathered every spring immediately
 back of the courthouse. The snow
 falls thick and heavy in Gitcheapolis
 in winter; and the pond was nothing
 more than snow water that the ineffi-
 cient drainage system of. the city did not quite absorb. Besides being the despair of the plumbers and the city engineer, it was a severe strain on the beauty-loving instincts of every inhabitant in the town who had any such instincts. It was muddy and murky and generally distasteful.
 A little boy played at the edge of the water, this spring day of long ago. Except for his interest in the pond. 1t would have been scarcely worth while to go to the trouble of explaining that 1t contained no fish. He, however, bitterly regretted the fact. In truth, he sometimes liked to believe that it
 
 never made a ripple, and as he had an uncommon imagination he was some times able to convince himself that this was so. But he never took hook and line and played at fishing. He was too much afraid of the laughter of his boy friends. His mother prob ably wouldn't object if he fished here, he thought, particularly if he were careful not to get his shoes covered with mud. But she wouldn't let him go down to Gitcheapo1is creek to fish with the other boys for mud cat. He was not very strong, she thought, and 1t was a rough sport anyway, and be sides-she didn't think he wanted to go very badly. As mothers are usual ly particularly understanding, this was a curious thing.
 The truth was that little Dan Fail ing wanted to fish almost as much as he wanted to live. He would dream about it of nights. His blood would glow with the thought of 1t in the springtime. Women the world over will have a hard time believing what an intense, heart-devouring passion the love of the chase can be, whether it is for fishing or hunting or merely knocking golf balls into a little hole upon a green. Sometimes they don't remember that this instinct is just as much a part of most men, and thus most boys, as their hands or their lips. It was acquired by just as la borious a process-the lives of un- counted thousands of ancestors who fshed and hunted for living.
 It was true that little Dan didn't look the part. Even then he showed signs of physical frailty. His eyes fD1 were not the color of fresh sirloin, as they should have been. In fact, one would have had to look very hard to see any color in them at all These facts are interesting from the light | they throw upon the next glimpse of | Dan, fully twenty years later. |
 Except for the fact that it was the | background for the earliest picture of | little Dan, the pool back of the court | house has very slittle importance in | his story. It did, however, afford an | Illustration to him of one of the real | ly astonishing truths of life. He saw | a shadow in the water that he pre- tended he thought might be a fish. He | threw stone at it.
 The only thing that happened was a splash, and then a slowly widening | ripple. The circumference of the rip pie grew ever larger, extended and | widened, and finally died at the edge of the shore. It set little Dan to thinking. He wondered if, had the pool been larger, the ripple still would have spread and if the pool had been eternity, whether the ripple would have gone on forever. At the time he | did not know the laws of cause and effect Later, when Gftcheapolis was 1 great and prosperous and no longer untfdy, he was going to find out that a kcause is nothing but a rock thrown Unto pond of fnfinity, and the ripple that is Its effect keeps growing and growing forever.
 The little incident that is the real beginning of this story was of no more importance than pebble thrown into the snow-water pond; but its eff feet was to remove the life of Dan Failing, since grown up, far out of the realms of the ordinary
 And that brings all matters down to 1919, in the last days of a particu- larly sleepy summer. You would hard