Beside the rear window of the blacksmith shop Jasper Lanning held hiswithered arms folded against his chest. With the dispassionate eye andthe aching heart of an artist he said to himself that his life work wasa failure. That life work was the young fellow who swung the sledge atthe forge, and truly it was a strange product for this seventy-year-oldveteran with his slant Oriental eyes and his narrow beard of white.Andrew Lanning was not even his son, but it came about in this way thatAndrew became the life work of Jasper.
Fifteen years before, the father of Andy died, and Jasper rode out ofthe mountain desert like a hawk dropping out of the pale-blue sky. Heburied his brother without a tear, and then sat down and looked at theslender child who bore his name. Andy was a beautiful boy. He had theblack hair and eyes, the well-made jaw, and the bone of the Lannings,and if his mouth was rather soft and girlish he laid the failing to theweakness of childhood. Jasper had no sympathy for tenderness in men. Hisown life was as littered with hard deeds as the side of a mountain withboulders. But the black, bright eyes and the well-made jaw of littleAndy laid hold on him, and he said to himself: "I'm fifty-five. I'mabout through with my saddle days. I'll settle down and turn out onepiece of work that'll last after I'm gone, and last with my signatureon it!"
That was fifteen years ago. And for fifteen years he had labored to makeAndy a man according to a grim pattern which was known in the Lanningclan, and elsewhere in the mountain desert. His program was as simple asthe curriculum of a Persian youth. On the whole, it was even simpler,for Jasper concentrated on teaching the boy how to ride and shoot, andwas not at all particular that he should learn to speak the truth. Buton the first two and greatest articles of his creed, how Jasper labored!
For fifteen years he poured his heart without stint into his work! Hetaught Andy to know a horse from hock to teeth, and to ride anythingthat wore hair. He taught him to know a gun as if it were a sentientthing. He taught him all the draws of old and new pattern, and laboredto give him both precision and speed. That was the work of fifteenyears, and now at the end of this time the old man knew that his lifework 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 andeddied through the shop, and Andy, working the bellows, was a black formagainst the square of the door, a square filled by the blinding white ofthe alkali dust in the road outside and the blinding white of the sunabove. Andy turned from the forge, bearing in his tongs a great bar ofiron black at the ends but white in the middle. The white place wassurrounded by a sparkling radiance. Andy caught up an eight-poundhammer, and it rose and fell lightly in his hand. The sparks rushedagainst the leather apron of the hammer wielder, and as the blows fellrapid waves of light were thrown against the face of Andrew.
Looking a