the war with a brevet of brigadier-general, an honor which in this
case--without invidious comparisons--had lighted upon shoulders amply
competent to bear it. But though he could manage a fight, when need was,
Newman heartily disliked the business; his four years in the army
had left him with an angry, bitter sense of the waste of precious
things--life and time and money and "smartness" and the early freshness
of purpose; and he had addressed himself to the pursuits of peace
with passionate zest and energy. He was of course as penniless when he
plucked off his shoulder-straps as when he put them on, and the only
capital at his disposal was his dogged resolution and his lively
perception of ends and means. Exertion and action were as natural to
him as respiration; a more completely healthy mortal had never trod the
elastic soil of the West. His experience, moreover, was as wide as his
capacity; when he was fourteen years old, necessity had taken him by
his slim young shoulders and pushed him into the street, to earn that
night's supper. He had not earned it but he had earned the next night's,
and afterwards, whenever he had had none, it was because he had gone
without it to use the money for something else, a keener pleasure or
a finer profit. He had turned his hand, with his brain in it, to many
things; he had been enterprising, in an eminent sense of the term; he
had been adventurous and even reckless, and he had known bitter failure
as well as brilliant success; but he was a born experimentalist, and he
had always found something to enjoy in the pressure of necessity, even
when it was as irritating as the haircloth shirt of the mediaeval monk.
At one time failure seemed inexorably his portion; ill-luck became
his bed-fellow, and whatever he touched he turned, not to gold, but
to ashes. His most vivid conception of a supernatural element in the
world's affairs had come to him once when this pertinacity of misfortune
was at its climax; there seemed to him something stronger in life than
his own will. But the mysterious something could only be the devil,
and he was accordingly seized with an intense personal enmity to this
impertinent force. He had known what it was to have utterly exhausted
his credit, to be unable to raise a dollar, and to find himself
at nightfall in a strange city, without a penny to mitigate its
strangeness. It was under these circumstances that he made his entrance
into San Francisco, the scene, sub