If Blue Port had been a pretty good-sized town, like near-by Patchogue, with a couple of mills, two or three banks, an electric light company, and other rudiments of an American municipality, Dick Hand would have owned them all--not outright, of course, but as the heaviest shareholder and the preferred creditor. But Blue Port had none of these things. Blue Port had only a two-three of stores, a justice of the peace (Judge Hollaby), an unorganized oyster industry, a faded little railroad station, and a postoffice. Nearly all the people in Blue Port got their living on or from the Great South Bay. They went oystering, fishing, eeling, clamming, duck shooting. They kept, some of them, a cow and a few pigs; all of them raised vegetables. Thus there was plenty to eat. There was not so much to wear, but there was enough. As for making money, mostly no one made any money. There was no way to. A few hundred dollars in cash, to buy a few clothes and pay, perhaps, a low rent, was enough for a whole family from one year’s end to the other. Such a place might be considered, and rightly, to offer very restricted opportunities for the capitalist, but Dick Hand made it do. He was not a daring financier. For years he had lived on a farm in the middle of Long Island, a farm in semi-hilly country, the farm left him by his father. It had to be worked hard, and when, after some dozen years of labour, the chance came to Dick Hand to sell it at a fabulous figure, he lost no time in doing so. A wealthy New Yorker had come along and bought the place simply because he saw in the lie of the land possibilities for a corkingly good private golf course. The course was never laid out. The New Yorker died while still quarrelling with his architect over the plans for a $200,000 summer “cottage,” and his executors and heirs looked ruefully at the large tract of land which had been his latest whim and which was difficult to “turn over”--even with a plough. But Dick Hand had received $20,000 in cold cash for 200 acres. He was satisfied. It was an impressive lot of money. It would have been greeted respectfully in Patchogue, and even in larger places. But the sudden possession of so much riches made Mr. Hand more cautious than ever. How to make it grow fastest? He had had enough of land. By most wonderful fortune, he had been enabled to convert land into money. It was a miracle. Water had been turned into wine; he would not depend upon it happening again. His wife, who had always been submissive to him, ventured a single suggestion: “Now would be a good time to straighten out matters with Hosea,” she remarked. Dick Hand looked at her coldly. She went on, uncomfortably: “I s’pose ’twouldn’t take so much. It wasn’t more’n $2,500, his share of father’s estate, was it?”