Kerosene City had long outgrown its infancy of planks and shingles, and had expanded into a huge town crammed with factories, and tall houses, tramways and elevators and churches, sky-scraping roofs, electric railways, chemical works, fire-belching foundries, hissing, screaming, vomiting machinery, and all the many joys of modern and American civilization. But Kerosene City, most of it Mr. Massarene’s property, was but an item in the Massarene property. He had been in many trades and many speculations; he owned railway plant and cattle ranches and steam-boats and grain-depots, and docks and tramways and manufactories, and men and women and children labored for him day and night by thousands harder than the Israelites toiled for the Pharaohs. Everything turned to gold that he touched. He bought for little with prodigious insight and sold for much with the same intuition. No foolish scruples hampered his acquisitiveness, no weak-minded compassion ever arrested him on any road which led to his own advantage. He had never been known to relent or to regret, to give except in ostentation, or to stir a step unless self-interest suggested and self-recompense awaited it. Herbert Spencer has said that kindness and courtesy are indispensable to success: William Massarene knew better than that philosopher. He had lived amongst men, and not amongst books. In the land of his adoption his fellows feared him as they feared no one else; his few short hard words cut them like the knotted lash of an overseer’s whip. He was dreaded, obeyed, hated: that was all the feeling he cared to excite. Whilst he remained in that country he never lived like a man of any means; he never spent a dollar on personal ease or comfort; but it was known far and wide that after Vanderbilt and Pullman the biggest pile in the States was his; his wife alone did not know it. To the day that she sailed past Sandy Hook on her way home Margaret Massarene had never ceased to work hard and to save any red cent she could. She knew nothing of his business, of his ambitions, of his hoarded wealth; when he took a first-class cabin on a Cunard steamer and bade her get a sealskin cloak for the voyage and buy herself a handsome outfit, she was astounded.