XXXIII. The Amateur Napoleon of Wall Street XXXIV. How the Chinook Came to Wall Street XXXV. The News Broken, Whereupon an Engagement is Broken XXXVI. The God in the Machine XXXVII. The Departure of Uncle Peter--And Some German Philosophy XXXVIII. Some Phenomena Peculiar to Spring XXXIX. An Unusual Plan of Action Is Matured XL. Some Rude Behaviour, of Which Only a Western Man Could Be Guilty XLI. The New Argonauts ILLUSTRATIONS "The fair and sometimes uncertain daughter of the house of Milbrey" "'Well, Billy Brue,--what's doin'?'" "The spell was broken" "'Why, you'd be Lady Casselthorpe, with dukes and counts takin' off their crowns to you'" "'Remember that saying of your pa's, "it takes all kinds of fools to make a world"'" "'Say it that way--" Miss Milbrey is engaged with Mr. Bines, and can't see you"'" THE SPENDERS CHAPTER I. The Second Generation is Removed When Daniel J. Bines died of apoplexy in his private car at Kaslo Junction no one knew just where to reach either his old father or his young son with the news of his death. Somewhere up the eastern slope of the Sierras the old man would be leading, as he had long chosen to lead each summer, the lonely life of a prospector. The young man, two years out of Harvard, and but recently back from an extended European tour, was at some point on the North Atlantic coast, beginning the season's pursuit of happiness as he listed. Only in a land so young that almost the present dwellers therein have made it might we find individualities which so decisively failed to blend. So little congruous was the family of Bines in root, branch, and blossom, that it might, indeed, be taken to picture an epic of Western life as the romancer would tell it. First of the line stands the figure of Peter Bines, the pioneer, contemporary with the stirring days of Fremont, of Kit Carson, of Harney, and Bridger; the fearless strivers toward an ever-receding West, fascinating for its untried dangers as for its fabled wealth,--the sturdy, grave men who fought and toiled and hoped, and realised in varying measure, but who led in sober truth a life such as the colours of no taleteller shall ever be high enough to reproduce. Next came Daniel J. Bines, a type of the builder and organiser who followed the trail blazed by the earlier pioneer; the genius who, finding the magic realm opened, forthwith became its exploiter to its vast renown and his own large profit, coining its wealth of minerals, lumber, cattle, and grain, and adventurously building the railroads that must always be had to drain a new land of savagery.