een the burning arch of the
sky and the scorching sands. Great cities rose before his eyes,
beckoning him, calling to him: brooding cities of gray turrets and foggy
streets; strange cities lit with sunset fires on domes and minarets;
laughing cities gay with festivals. All these things he was hungry to
see; to see as a master of the world walking its varied ways, achieving
its affairs. Through his waking dreams marched a parade of great
figures, Hannibal, Caesar the Corsican, Talleyrand, Disraeli, Montagu,
Pitt, the men with whom this tongueless voice proclaimed his
brotherhood; the men who had found life's granite as hard as that which
lay heaped about him, who had conquered it and chiseled it into
monuments of history. His hand slipped under his pillow and closed on
the dollars he had made. His troubled face smoothed into a smile.

"Slivers Martin paid me ten dollars," he murmured to himself, "an' I
bought the lot of 'em for seven."

CHAPTER IV

When young Jefferson Edwardes set out the next morning for his winter's
imprisonment in the shack where he must fight the white specter of slow
death, amid the white isolation of the snow, he left behind him a
household to all outward seeming as quiet as it had ever been. But all
that morning and afternoon while Ham was away at school, Tom Burton sat
deeply engrossed in calculations involving scraps of paper upon which he
was laboriously figuring, and frequent consultation of a slender
bank-book. And Ham, as he trudged back across the snow, came with a face
set for combat. Hitherto he had obeyed and now the time had come when
his inherent power of leadership must assert itself. If the world could
not conquer him--and he was utterly certain it could not--he must not
flinch from the task of riding down the first opposition he met--even
though it be the opposition of his own blood. Afterward his family
should know only tenderness and ease and luxury, but now they must
acknowledge his mastery.

Of the possibility of failure he never dreamed. His star was in the
heavens and Destiny had spoken. Just as the cork plunged to the bottom
of the pail must inevitably rise to the top, so he must rise. He was of
the oligarchy of the great, of the chosen of the gods, and now the
voices of Destiny were calling him to the undertaking of his mission.
Tonight the question must be thrashed out, yet when he arrived at the
house he went quietly about the round of monotonous chores and af