To tell the truth I had already got well going the new dramatization of myself as a man of action but was not sure of myself in the new rôle to want to face any of the workmen in the house. Nora I thought I could handle. As I stood in the room dressed in my best clothes I counted my money and then decided I would not be a Western ranchman after all but a man of commerce, an empire builder perhaps. I had in my possession some ninety-eight dollars which seemed to me at the moment sufficient for a start in almost any undertaking. It would support me for a few weeks while I looked about and then I would pitch in somewhere and become an empire builder. It would take time but what was time to me? I had an abundance of time. “I’ll do it,” I told myself resolutely. Why not? Was I not a man of imagination? Was I not young and did I not have a strong body? As I washed the dried blood off my face, put on my Sunday suit and adjusted my tie I in fancy swept the field of commercial adventure with my somewhat damaged eyes. There were the great cities of Chicago and New York I had not yet seen, although I had read much about them and about men who had grown from poverty to riches and power in them. Like all young Americans I had read innumerable tales of men who had begun with nothing and had become great leaders, owners of railroads, governors of states, foreign ambassadors, generals of armies, presidents of great modern republics. Abraham Lincoln walking miles through a storm after a hard day’s work to borrow his first book, Jay Gould the young Wall Street clerk, setting up a great dynasty of wealth, Daniel Drew the cattle dealer becoming a millionaire, Garfield the canal-boat boy and Vanderbilt the ferryman become President and millionaire, Grant the failure, hauling hides from his father’s tannery at Galena, Illinois, to St. Louis--and, it was said, getting so well piped sometimes on the homeward journey that he fell off the wagon--he also became great, the winner of a mighty war, President of his country, a noted traveler, receiving the homage of kings. “And I can carry my liquor better than he could, by all reports,” I said to myself. Were these men any better than myself? At the moment and in spite of the gloom of an hour before, I thought not, and as for my having but ninety-eight dollars, what did that matter? As a matter of fact one gathered from having read American history that there was a sort of advantage to be gained from starting with nothing. One had something to talk and brag about in one’s old age, and when one became a candidate for President one furnished one’s campaign managers with materials for campaign slogans.