Lemuel Huntington had told himself a thousand times that his Dot must have an education. He had long since become infatuated with the notion. It had him gripped as tenaciously as the seductive toils of romance had the imaginative Dot enmeshed. It was a consuming mania with him.
“If I got to steal the money, she’s goin’ to college—the dream of her darlin’ dead mother. S’help me, I’ll turn thief if I got to!”
Lemuel, the failure, was fifty-one—the age when most men begin to slow down, whether they want to or not. Twenty years before, he and his little bride had left a perfectly good living in Iowa to try a short cut to fortune in California. The fact that more often than not distance is a most captivating beckoner, did not occur to these happy newlyweds until they reached the Golden State
