ind," Marlowe began in his
quiet voice. "Most of the very rich men I met with in America had become
so by virtue of abnormal greed, or abnormal industry, or abnormal
personal force, or abnormal luck. None of them had remarkable
intellects. Manderson delighted too in heaping up wealth; he worked
incessantly at it; he was a man of dominant will; he had quite his share
of luck; but what made him singular was his brain-power. In his own
country they would perhaps tell you that it was his ruthlessness in
pursuit of his aims that was his most striking characteristic; but there
are hundreds of them who would have carried out his plans with just as
little consideration for others if they could have formed the plans.

"I used to think that his strain of Indian blood, remote as it was,
might have something to do with the cunning and pitilessness of the man.
Strangely enough, the existence of that strain was unknown to anyone but
himself and me. It was when he asked me to apply my taste for
genealogical work to his own obscure family history that I made the
discovery that he had in him a share of the blood of the Iroquois chief
Montour and his French wife, a terrible woman who ruled the savage
politics of the tribes of the Wilderness two hundred years ago. The
Mandersons were active in the fur trade on the Pennsylvania border in
those days, and more than one of them married Indian women. Other Indian
blood than Montour's may have descended to Manderson, for all I can say,
through previous and subsequent unions; some of the wives' antecedents
were quite untraceable, and there were so many generations of pioneering
before the whole country was brought under civilization. Manderson was
thunderstruck at what I told him, and was anxious to conceal it from
every soul. Of course I never gave it away while he lived, and I don't
think he supposed I would; but I have thought since that his mind took a
turn against me from that time onward. It happened about a year before
his death."

"Had Manderson," asked Mr. Cupples, so unexpectedly that the other
started, "any definable religious attitude?"

Marlowe considered a moment. "None that I ever heard of," he said.
"Worship and prayer were quite unknown to him, so far as I could see,
and I never heard him mention religion. I should doubt if he had any
real sense of God at all, or if he was capable of knowing God through
the emotions. But I understood that as a child he had had a religious
up-