While Ford ate with a controlled voraciousness which spoke eloquently of
his twenty-four hours of fasting and exposure, Mason gossiped
inattentively and studied the man.
Eight years leave their impress of mental growth or deterioration upon a
man. Outwardly Ford was not much changed since Mason had come with him
out of Alaska and lost sight of him afterwards. There was the maturity
which the man of thirty possessed and which the virile young fellow of
twenty-one had lacked. There was the same straight glance, the same
atmosphere of squareness and mental poise. Those were qualities which
Mason set down as valuable factors in his estimate of the man. Besides,
there were other signs which did not make so pleasant a reading.
Eight years--and a few of them, at least, had been spent wastefully in
tearing down what the other years had built; Mason had heard that Ford
was "going to the dogs," and that by the short trail men blazed for
themselves centuries ago and which those who came after have made a
highway--the whisky trail. Mason had heard, now and then, of ten
thousand dollars coming to Ford upon the death of his father and going
almost as suddenly as it had come.
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