His wanderings as a tramp--in his own account of himself he used the word "tramp" with a shocking lack of pride--led him inevitably into the far Northwest. Men were doing things up there. The country fairly seethed with the activity of live, virile men who were taking the first staunch grip upon the tricky wheel of fortune and were turning it to their own account. Every man was building; no man complained of conditions, for conditions were so new and so ready to hand that he who found fault was merely lessening his own chance to secure his share of the vast resources that spread before him, welcoming the greedy fingers of him who courted the future and shunned the past. All men lived in the present out there in the great stretches, and all men were strong and eager. Joseph Hooper caught the fever that infected the West. He shook off the fetters that bound him to a far from enchanted East, and began to squirm with the first tickling sensations of an ambition that had never really made itself felt, even in the old days of successful achievement among men who were content to tread the beaten and commonplace highway toward riches. The spirit of the West gripped him in its great, enveloping hands, picked him out of the slough and set him down again, plump upon his two feet, high and dry, prodding him violently all the while with a spur that would not permit him to stop or to take a step backward, with the natural result that he moved forward--slowly, dazedly at first, and then with a mighty rush. He had one advantage over most of the men who were being driven helter-skelter by the grateful lash of the West: he was a trained money-getter. Back of him were generations of shrewd business men, while dormant in his own being was the half-stunned thing called natural ability. The simple shrewdness of Joseph Hooper, combined with a certain hitherto unconfessed lack of respect for the Golden Rule, to say nothing of a vain-glorious desire to kick the world that had kicked him, soon produced opportunities that paved the way for his rehabilitation. Without a dollar to his name, with nothing in the shape of resources save a self-sufficient nerve and an infinite eastern contempt for these struggling westerners, he began to promote things!