r know
the truth unless some other spectator of his schemes should report it;
and the truth could not surely be checked, save by some one, perhaps,
whose life was joined to his, by one that truly loved him, whose fate
was his.

His brain was afire. By one that truly loved him! Who was there that
loved him? Who was there at one with him in all his deep designs, in all
he had done and meant to do? Neither brother, nor sister, nor friend,
nor any other. None of his blood was there who could share with him the
constructive work he had set out to do. There was no friend whose fate
was part of his own. There was the Boss Doctor: but Rockwell was tied to
his own responsibilities, and he could not give up, of course, would not
give up his life to the schemes of another. There were a dozen men whom
he had helped to forge ahead by his own schemes, but their destinies
were not linked with his. Only one whose life was linked with his could
be trusted to be his eyes, to be the true reporter of all he did, had
done, or planned to do. Only one who loved him.

But even one who loved him could not carry through his incompleted
work against the assaults of his enemies, who were powerful, watchful,
astute, and merciless; who had a greed which set money higher than
all else in the world. They were of the new order of things in the
New World. The business of life was to them not a system of barter and
exchange, a giving something of value to get something of value, with a
margin of profit for each, and a sense of human equity behind; it was
a cockpit where one man sought to get what another man had--and get it
almost anyhow.

It was the work of the faro-bank man, whose sleight of hand deceived the
man that carried the gun.

All the old humanity and good-fellowship of the trader, the man who
exchanged, as it was in the olden days of the world and continued in
greater or less degree till the present generation--all that was gone.
It was held in contempt. It had prevailed when men were open robbers and
filibusters and warriors, giving their lives, if need be, to get what
they wanted, making force their god. It had triumphed over the violence
and robbery of the open road until the dying years of one century
and the young years of a new century. Then the day of the trickster
came--and men laughed at the idea of fair exchange and strove to give
an illusive value for a thing of real value--the remorseless sleight of
hand which the law could n