BETTY MEETS THE HEIR An emotion which he did not trouble himself to define impelled Calumet to wheel his pony when he reached the far end of the corral fence and ride into the cottonwood where, thirteen years before, he had seen the last of his mother.

No emotion moved him as he rode toward it, but when he came upon the grave he experienced a savage satisfaction because it had been sadly neglected.

There was no headboard to mark the spot, no familiar mound of earth; only a sunken stretch, a pitiful little patch of sand, with a few weeds thrusting up out of it, nodding to the slight breeze and casting grotesque shadows in the somber twilight.
Calumet was not surprised.

It was all as he had pictured it during those brief moments when he had allowed his mind to dwell on his past; its condition vindicated his previous conviction that his father would neglect it.

Therefore, his satisfaction was not in finding the grave as it was, but in the knowledge that he had not misjudged his father.
And though he had not loved his mother, the condition of the grave served to infuse him with a newer and more bitter hatred for the surviving parent.