n's name was Antoine de Vallombrosa, Marquis de Mores. He was
a member of the Orleans family, son of a duke, a "white lily of
France," remotely in line for the throne; an unusually handsome man,
tall and straight, black of hair and moustache, twenty-five or
twenty-six years old, athletic, vigorous, and commanding. He had been
a French officer, a graduate of the French military school of Saint
Cyr, and had come to America following his marriage abroad with Medora
von Hoffman, the daughter of a wealthy New York banker of German
blood. His cousin, Count Fitz James, a descendant of the Jacobin
exiles, had hunted in the Bad Lands the year previous, returning to
France with stories of the new cattle country that stirred the
Marquis's imagination. He was an adventurous spirit. "He had no
judgment," said Merrifield, "but he was a fighter from hell." The
stories of life on the frontier lured him as they had lured others,
but the dreams that came to him were more complex and expensive dreams
than those which came to the other young men who turned toward Dakota
in those early eighties.

The Marquis arrived in Little Missouri with his father-in-law's
millions at his back and a letter of introduction to Howard Eaton in
his pocket. The letter, from a prominent business man in the East,
ended, it seemed to Eaton, rather vaguely: "I don't know what
experience he has had in business or anything of that kind, but he has
some large views."

The Marquis enthusiastically unfolded these views. "I am going to
build an abattoir. I am going to buy all the beef, sheep, and hogs
that come over the Northern Pacific, and I am going to slaughter them
here and then ship them to Chicago and the East."

"I don't think you have any idea how much stock comes over the
Northern Pacific," Eaton remarked.

"It doesn't matter!" cried the Marquis. "My father-in-law has ten
million dollars and can borrow ten million dollars more. I've got old
Armour and the rest of them matched dollar for dollar."

Eaton said to himself that unquestionably the Marquis's views were
"large."

"Do you think I am impractical?" the Marquis went on. "I am not
impractical. My plan is altogether feasible. I do not merely think
this. I know. My intuition tells me so. I pride myself on having a
natural intuition. It takes me only a few seconds to understand a
situation that other men have to puzzle over for hours. I seem to see
every side of a question at once. I assure you, I am