by the spectacle of Dryfoos's unfailing luck, which Fulkerson was
fond of dazzling himself with. It perfectly consisted with a keen sense
of whatever was sordid and selfish in a man on whom his career must have
had its inevitable effect. He liked to philosophize the case with March,
to recall Dryfoos as he was when he first met him still somewhat in the
sap, at Moffitt, and to study the processes by which he imagined him to
have dried into the hardened speculator, without even the pretence to
any advantage but his own in his ventures. He was aware of painting the
character too vividly, and he warned March not to accept it exactly in
those tints, but to subdue them and shade it for himself. He said that
where his advantage was not concerned, there was ever so much good in
Dryfoos, and that if in some things he had grown inflexible, he had
expanded in others to the full measure of the vast scale on which he
did business. It had seemed a little odd to March that a man should put
money into such an enterprise as 'Every Other Week' and go off about
other affairs, not only without any sign of anxiety, but without any
sort of interest. But Fulkerson said that was the splendid side of
Dryfoos. He had a courage, a magnanimity, that was equal to the strain
of any such uncertainty. He had faced the music once for all, when he
asked Fulkerson what the thing would cost in the different degrees
of potential failure; and then he had gone off, leaving everything to
Fulkerson and the younger Dryfoos, with the instruction simply to go
ahead and not bother him about it. Fulkerson called that pretty tall for
an old fellow who used to bewail the want of pigs and chickens to occupy
his mind. He alleged it as another proof of the versatility of the
American mind, and of the grandeur of institutions and opportunities
that let every man grow to his full size, so that any man in America
could run the concern if necessary. He believed that old Dryfoos could
step into Bismarck's shoes and run the German Empire at ten days'
notice, or about as long as it would take him to go from New York to
Berlin. But Bismarck would not know anything about Dryfoos's plans till
Dryfoos got ready to show his hand. Fulkerson himself did not pretend
to say what the old man had been up to since he went West. He was at
Moffitt first, and then he was at Chicago, and then he had gone out to
Denver to look after some mines he had out there, and a railroad or two;
and now h