or
some men! This one had come like the prince in the fairy tale on his
magic carpet. If Alice Langham were to leave Valencia that next day,
Clay could not follow her. He had his duties and responsibilities; he
was at another man's bidding.

But this Prince Fortunatus had but to raise anchor and start in
pursuit, knowing that he would be welcome wherever he found her. That
was the worst of it to Clay, for he knew that men did not follow women
from continent to continent without some assurance of a friendly
greeting. Clay's mind went back to the days when he was a boy, when
his father was absent fighting for a lost cause; when his mother taught
in a little schoolhouse under the shadow of Pike's Peak, and when Kit
Carson was his hero. He thought of the poverty of those days poverty
so mean and hopeless that it was almost something to feel shame for; of
the days that followed when, an orphan and without a home, he had
sailed away from New Orleans to the Cape. How the mind of the
mathematician, which he had inherited from the Boston schoolmistress,
had been swayed by the spirit of the soldier, which he had inherited
from his father, and which led him from the mines of South Africa to
little wars in Madagascar, Egypt, and Algiers. It had been a life as
restless as the seaweed on a rock. But as he looked back to its poor
beginnings and admitted to himself its later successes, he gave a sigh
of content, and shaking off the mood stood up and paced the length of
the veranda.

He looked up the hill to the low-roofed bungalow with the palm-leaves
about it, outlined against the sky, and as motionless as patterns cut
in tin. He had built that house. He had built it for her. That was
her room where the light was shining out from the black bulk of the
house about it like a star. And beyond the house he saw his five great
mountains, the knuckles of the giant hand, with its gauntlet of iron
that lay shut and clenched in the face of the sea that swept up
whimpering before it. Clay felt a boyish, foolish pride rise in his
breast as he looked toward the great mines he had discovered and
opened, at the iron mountains that were crumbling away before his touch.

He turned his eyes again to the blazing yacht, and this time there was
no trace of envy in them. He laughed instead, partly with pleasure at
the thought of the struggle he scented in the air, and partly at his
own braggadocio.

"I'm not afraid," he said, smiling, an