and the great oil fields not far away which were then in
their infancy. All of them dreamed a dream, saw a vision. But not all of
them lived to see their dream come true.

Old Anthony lived to see it.

In the late eighties, his wife having been by that time decorously
interred in one of the first great mausoleums west of the mountains,
Anthony Cardew found himself already wealthy. He owned oil wells and
coal mines. His mines supplied his coke ovens with coal, and his own
river boats, as well as railroads in which he was a director, carried
his steel.

He labored ably and well, and not for wealth alone. He was one of a
group of big-visioned men who saw that a nation was only as great as its
industries. It was only in his later years that he loved power for
the sake of power, and when, having outlived his generation, he had
developed a rigidity of mind that made him view the forced compromises
of the new regime as pusillanimous.

He considered his son Howard's quiet strength weakness. "You have no
stamina," he would say. "You have no moral fiber. For God's sake, make a
stand, you fellows, and stick to it."

He had not mellowed with age. He viewed with endless bitterness the
passing of his own day and generation, and the rise to power of younger
men; with their "shilly-shallying," he would say. He was an aristocrat,
an autocrat, and a survival. He tied Howard's hands in the management of
the now vast mills, and then blamed him for the results.

But he had been a great man.

He had had two children, a boy and a girl. The girl had been the tragedy
of his middle years, and Howard had been his hope.

On the heights outside the city and overlooking the river he owned a
farm, and now and then, on Sunday afternoons in the eighties, he drove
out there, with Howard sitting beside him, a rangy boy in his teens,
in the victoria which Anthony considered the proper vehicle for
Sunday afternoons. The farmhouse was in a hollow, but always on those
excursions Anthony, fastidiously dressed, picking his way half-irritably
through briars and cornfields, would go to the edge of the cliffs and
stand there, looking down. Below was the muddy river, sluggish always,
but a thing of terror in spring freshets. And across was the east side,
already a sordid place, its steel mills belching black smoke that killed
the green of the hillsides, its furnaces dwarfed by distance and height,
its rows of unpainted wooden structures which housed the