Oh, but those days when he had been working and scheming to get up in the world and was thinking that money was the great thing—the only thing! Those impossible wooden towns in the Northwest and elsewhere in which he had lived and worked, and those worse hotels and boarding-houses—always hunting, hunting for money or the key to it. The greasy, stinking craft in which he had made his way up weedy and muddy rivers in Honduras and elsewhere—looking for what? Snakes, mosquitoes, alligators, tarantulas, horned toads and lizards. In Honduras he had slept under chiqua trees on mats of chiqua leaves, with only a fire to keep away snakes and other things. And of a morning he had chased away noisy monkeys and parroquets from nearby branches with rotten fruit so as to sleep a little longer. Alone, he had tramped through fever swamps, pursued by Pequi Indians, who wanted only the contents of his wretched pack. And he had stared at huge coyal palms, a hundred feet high, with the great feathery leaves fifteen feet long and their golden flowers three feet high. Ah, well, that was over now. He had shot the quetzal with its yellow tail feathers three feet long and had traded them for food. Once he had all but died of fever in a halfbreed’s hut back of Cayo. And the halfbreed had then stolen his gun and razor and other goods and left him to make his way onward as best he might. That was life for you, just like that. People were like that. And it was during that time that he had come to realize that by no honest way at his age was he likely to come to anything financially. Roaming about the drowsy, sun-baked realm, he had encountered Messner, an American and a fugitive, he guessed, and it was Messner who had outlined to him the very scheme by which he had been able, later, to amass his first quick fortune in New York. It was Messner who had told him of Torbey and how he had come up to London from Central Africa to offer shares in a bogus rubber enterprise based on immense forests which he was supposed to have found in the wilds of Africa yet which did not exist. And it was the immense though inaccessible rubber forests in Honduras that had inspired him to try the same thing in New York. Why not? A new sucker was born every minute, and he had all to gain and nothing to lose. Messner said that Torbey had advertised for a widow with some money to push his enterprise, whereupon he had proceeded to tell the London speculative public of his treasure and to sell two pound shares for as low as ten shillings in order to show tremendous rises in value—to issue two million pounds’ worth of absolutely worthless stock.