cynical morals to which he had been bred; and his intelligent brain was
of the kind that goes with weakness--shrewd and sly, preferring to
slink along the byways of craft even when the highway of courage lies
straight and easy. But he had physical bravery and the self-confidence
that is based upon an assured social position in a community where
social position is worshiped; so, he passed for manly and proud when he
was in reality neither. Family vanity he had; personal pride he had
not.

In many environments his weakness would have remained hidden even from
himself, and he would have lived and died in the odor and complacence
of respectability. But not in the strain and stress of Wall Street.
There he had naturally developed not into a lion, not even into a wolf,
but into a coyote.

Wall Street found him out in ten years--about one year after it began
to take note of him and his skulking ways and his habit of prowling in
the wake of the pack. Only his adroit use of his family connections
and social position saved him from being trampled to death by the
wolves and eaten by his brother coyotes. Thereafter he lived
precariously, but on the whole sumptuously, upon carcasses of one kind
and another. He participated in "strike" suits against big
corporations--he would set on a pack of coyotes to dog the lions and to
raise discordant howls that inopportunely centered public attention
upon leonine, lawless doings; the lions would pay him well to call off
the pack. He assisted sometimes wolves and sometimes coyotes in
flotations of worthless, or almost worthless, stocks and bonds from
gold and mahogany offices and upon a sea of glittering prospectuses.
He had a hand in all manner of small, shady transactions of lawful, or
almost lawful, swindling that were tolerated by lions and wolves,
because at bottom there is a feeling of fellowship among creatures of
prey as against creatures preyed upon.

There were days when he came home haggard and blue in the lips to tell
Leonora that he must fly. There were days when he returned from the
chase, or rather from the skulk, elated, youthful, his pockets full of
money and his imagination afire with hopes of substantial wealth. But
his course was steadily downward, his methods steadily farther and
farther from the line of the law. Dumont came just in time to save him,
came to build him up from the most shunned of coyotes into a deceptive
imitation of a wolf with aspirations toward