The Titan | Page 4

gone, and with it had
been lost the great business prospects of his earlier manhood. He must
begin again.
It would be useless to repeat how a second panic following upon a
tremendous failure--that of Jay Cooke & Co.--had placed a second
fortune in his hands. This restored wealth softened him in some degree.
Fate seemed to have his personal welfare in charge. He was sick of the
stock-exchange, anyhow, as a means of livelihood, and now decided
that he would leave it once and for all. He would get in something
else--street-railways, land deals, some of the boundless opportunities of
the far West. Philadelphia was no longer pleasing to him. Though now
free and rich, he was still a scandal to the pretenders, and the financial
and social world was not prepared to accept him. He must go his way
alone, unaided, or only secretly so, while his quondam friends watched
his career from afar. So, thinking of this, he took the train one day, his
charming mistress, now only twenty-six, coming to the station to see
him off. He looked at her quite tenderly, for she was the quintessence
of a certain type of feminine beauty.
"By-by, dearie," he smiled, as the train-bell signaled the approaching

departure. "You and I will get out of this shortly. Don't grieve. I'll be
back in two or three weeks, or I'll send for you. I'd take you now, only I
don't know how that country is out there. We'll fix on some place, and
then you watch me settle this fortune question. We'll not live under a
cloud always. I'll get a divorce, and we'll marry, and things will come
right with a bang. Money will do that."
He looked at her with his large, cool, penetrating eyes, and she clasped
his cheeks between her hands.
"Oh, Frank," she exclaimed, "I'll miss you so! You're all I have."
"In two weeks," he smiled, as the train began to move, "I'll wire or be
back. Be good, sweet."
She followed him with adoring eyes--a fool of love, a spoiled child, a
family pet, amorous, eager, affectionate, the type so strong a man
would naturally like--she tossed her pretty red gold head and waved
him a kiss. Then she walked away with rich, sinuous, healthy
strides--the type that men turn to look after.
"That's her--that's that Butler girl," observed one railroad clerk to
another. "Gee! a man wouldn't want anything better than that, would
he?"
It was the spontaneous tribute that passion and envy invariably pay to
health and beauty. On that pivot swings the world.
Never in all his life until this trip had Cowperwood been farther west
than Pittsburg. His amazing commercial adventures, brilliant as they
were, had been almost exclusively confined to the dull, staid world of
Philadelphia, with its sweet refinement in sections, its pretensions to
American social supremacy, its cool arrogation of traditional leadership
in commercial life, its history, conservative wealth, unctuous
respectability, and all the tastes and avocations which these imply. He
had, as he recalled, almost mastered that pretty world and made its
sacred precincts his own when the crash came. Practically he had been
admitted. Now he was an Ishmael, an ex-convict, albeit a millionaire.

But wait! The race is to the swift, he said to himself over and over. Yes,
and the battle is to the strong. He would test whether the world would
trample him under foot or no.
Chicago, when it finally dawned on him, came with a rush on the
second morning. He had spent two nights in the gaudy Pullman then
provided--a car intended to make up for some of the inconveniences of
its arrangements by an over-elaboration of plush and tortured
glass--when the first lone outposts of the prairie metropolis began to
appear. The side-tracks along the road-bed over which he was speeding
became more and more numerous, the telegraph-poles more and more
hung with arms and strung smoky-thick with wires. In the far distance,
cityward, was, here and there, a lone working-man's cottage, the home
of some adventurous soul who had planted his bare hut thus far out in
order to reap the small but certain advantage which the growth of the
city would bring.
The land was flat--as flat as a table--with a waning growth of brown
grass left over from the previous year, and stirring faintly in the
morning breeze. Underneath were signs of the new green--the New
Year's flag of its disposition. For some reason a crystalline atmosphere
enfolded the distant hazy outlines of the city, holding the latter like a
fly in amber and giving it an artistic subtlety which touched him.
Already a devotee of art, ambitious for connoisseurship, who had had
his joy, training, and sorrow out of the collection he had made and