“It’s all rot,” he muttered, “this idea that the loafer life of the far West gives either scope, strength, or courage to any man. It is all mere barbarism, and only a windy discounting of a future which never comes. A long, bootless struggle with the meaner conditions of life.” He recalled his varied experiences as notary public, deputy county clerk, cashier of a shoddy bank—a concern which “folded its Arabian tents” in six months. Real estate dealer he had been in several aspiring “boom towns,” and also, secretary of many frontier “wind” corporations, whose beautifully engraved stock certificates were now either carried around in the pocketbooks of dupes or else stuck up in Western saloons, to the huge edification of the ungodly. This strange wandering life had made him a fox in cunning, though not as yet a ravening wolf, for there was little to prey upon in those dreary distant Occidental preserves. But, his fangs were well sharpened for the fray. He realized, as the lights of Haverstraw gleamed out “beyond the swelling tide,” that he was as yet without any definite plan of operations. A singular incident, illustrative of the roughly good-humored social code of the wild West had caused him to seek the city of Manhattan. The political clique which had coolly plotted the murder of his crafty father, with a last generous twinge of conscience, had sent all the private papers of the defunct lawyer over to his son, who was listlessly engaged at the time in endeavoring, on a net cash capital of a hundred and fifty dollars, to float a ten million dollar corporation, in order to utilize certain waste energy of those foaming falls of the Spokane River, which have so long caused both the salmon and the Indians a great deal of unnecessary trouble. And then, young Vreeland wearily explored those ashes of life—the “papers in the case” of the defunct. The unwelcome discovery of many evidences of his father’s shame and the revealing of all that secret life which had sent his patient mother to the shadowy bourne of heartbroken wives, was somewhat mitigated by the discovery of a paid-up policy of ten thousand dollars in the great “Acqueduct Life Insurance of New York City.” There was, as usual, some strings and filaments hanging out loosely knotted up, and it had been a labor of months, involving a correspondence of some acerbity, for him to obtain letters of administration, close up his father’s “estate,” and depart to Gotham to receive a check for seven thousand dollars in full settlement of the claim. On the road over from Spokane, Mr. Harold Vreeland had carefully counted all his ships. He had even gone over all his own abortive attempts at opening any useful career, and so, on this summer evening, he gloomily felt how poorly prepared he was to fight the battle of life against the keen competition and increasing pressure of his peers in New York City.