world, Adam Gaudylock had seemed nearest the gates of escape.  But Adam, he thought, was of the woods and the earth, even as his father was, and as the tobacco was, and as he himself was.  His enormous need was for some one to follow whose feet were above the fat, red fields and the leafy trails.  All this was present with him as he watched the oncoming figure.  Great men kept their word.  Had not Mr. Jefferson said that he would overtake them?—­and there he was!  He was coming down to the camp-fire, he was going to stop and talk to the surly giant, like Giant Despair, who sat and smoked beside it.

Lewis Rand left the river and the windy sycamore and hastened across the sere grass.  “Father, father!” he cried.  “Do you know who that is?” In his young voice there was both warning and appeal.  Adam Gaudylock, he knew, had spoken to his father, but Gideon had given no sign.  Suppose, no matter who spoke, his father would give, forever, no other sign than that oft seen and always hated jerk of the head toward the tobacco-fields?

Gideon Rand took his pipe from his lips.  “It’s Mr. Jefferson,” he answered laconically.  “He’s the one man in this country to whom I’d listen.”

Jefferson rode up to the group about the camp-fire, checked his horse, and gave the tobacco-roller and his son a plain man’s greeting to plain men.  The eagerness of the boy’s face did not escape him; when he dismounted, flung the reins of Wildair to his groom, and crossed the bit of turf to the fire beneath the pines, he knew that he was pleasing a young heart.  He loved youth, and to the young he was always nobly kind.

“Good-evening, Mr. Rand,” he said.  “You are homeward bound, as I am.  It is good to see Albemarle faces after years of the French.  I had the pleasure of making your son’s acquaintance yesterday.  It is a great thing to be the father of a son, for so one ceases to be a loose end and becomes a link in the great chain.  Your son, I think, will do you honour.  And, man to man, you must pay him in the same coin.  We on a lower rung of the ladder must keep our hands from the ankles of the climbers above us!  Make room for me on that log, my lad!  Your father and I will talk awhile.”

Thus it was that an able lawyer took up the case of young Lewis Rand.  It was the lawyer’s pleasure to give aid to youth, and to mould the mind of youth.  He had many proteges, to all of whom he was invariably kind, invariably generous.  The only return he exacted was that of homage.  The yoke was not heavy, for, after all, the homage was to Ideas, to large, sagacious, and far-reaching Thought.  It was in the year 1790 that he broke Gideon Rand’s resistance to his son’s devotion to other gods than those of the Rands.  The year that followed that evening on the Albemarle road found Lewis Rand reading law in an office in Charlottesville.  A few more years, and he was called to the bar; a little longer, and his name began to be an oft-spoken one in his native county, and not unknown throughout Virginia.