He was in the middle forties, a man noticeable anywhere for the overmastering vitality of his carriage and the defiant poise of his head. Nature had admirably designed him for what he was intended to be—a being always at war with men and surrounding circumstances. His face was devoid of any fine indications of sensibility, of reflection, or humorous perception of life. The upper and lower maxillary bones were in such gaunt relief they seemed rather steel girders hung to support a granite will. The head was square, sunk rather than placed upon his shoulders, and the line of the head at the back was straight and full of crude power. He had, at the same time, a suggestion in the shoulders of the obstinacy of the buffalo, the most distinctive of American beasts, and in the eye-pits of the fatalism of the Indian, which as a type often seems not so much the physical tenacity of an unexplained race as it does the peculiar impress of a continent and an atmosphere surcharged with vitality. The eyes were a clear blue, the eyes of a boy in mischief who is still sublimely defiant of the tripping obstacles of an ethical code. This quality of the boy, characteristic too of the American, was the secret of all his seeming inconstancy of unrelenting cruelty and sudden sentimental impulsiveness. Life was to him a huge dare, and all the perils of finance the hazards of a monstrous gamble, which alone were able to supply him with that overwhelming quality of sensation that such men covet in life. A waif at six; a wharf rat at twelve, endowed with the strength of a man; leader of a gang at sixteen, hated, feared, always fighting; gaining his first start in politics, and then, by making a lucky strike in the silver mines of Colorado, educating himself with primitive necessary knowledge, always acquiring, never relaxing what his fingers touched, a terrible antagonist, risking his all a dozen times in the hunger for a greater stake—he had emerged at last from the churning vortex of a brutal struggle, possessor of a fortune that fifty times had hung on the events of a day. For five years he had been involved in countless lawsuits, accused of chicanery, extortion, conspiracy, and even murder. At the end of which period he came forth victorious, without losing a single suit, surrounded, it is true, by every calumny that could be invented, accused of manipulating legislatures, corrupting judges, and removing witnesses. Through it all he had remained unshattered, boyishly delighted, his body unyielding to the strain of sleepless nights and months of unrelenting vigilance. He had lived hard, ready to gamble for a thousand or a hundred thousand, cynically announcing his motto: "No friends. So long as every man is my enemy, I am safe."