ng."

"What was his name?"

"Graham."

"No--I mean--that American's."

"Isbister."

"Isbister!" cried Graham. "Why, I don't even know the name."

"Of course not," said the old man. "Of course not. People don't learn
much in the schools nowadays. But I know all about him. He was a rich
American who went from England, and he left the Sleeper even more than
Warming. How he made it? That I don't know. Something about pictures by
machinery. But he made it and left it, and so the Council had its start.
It was just a council of trustees at first."

"And how did it grow?"

"Eh!--but you're not up to things. Money attracts money--and twelve
brains are better than one. They played it cleverly. They worked politics
with money, and kept on adding to the money by working currency and
tariffs. They grew--they grew. And for years the twelve trustees hid the
growing of the Sleeper's estate under double names and company titles and
all that. The Council spread by title deed, mortgage, share, every
political party, every newspaper they bought. If you listen to the old
stories you will see the Council growing and growing. Billions and
billions of lions at last--the Sleeper's estate. And all growing out of a
whim--out of this Warming's will, and an accident to Isbister's sons.

"Men are strange," said the old man. "The strange thing to me is how the
Council worked together so long. As many as twelve. But they worked in
cliques from the first. And they've slipped back. In my young days
speaking of the Council was like an ignorant man speaking of God. We
didn't think they could do wrong. We didn't know of their women and all
that! Or else I've got wiser.

"Men are strange," said the old man. "Here are you, young and
ignorant, and me--sevendy years old, and I might reasonably before
getting--explaining it all to you short and clear.

"Sevendy," he said, "sevendy, and I hear and see--hear better than I
see. And reason clearly, and keep myself up to all the happenings of
things. Sevendy!

"Life is strange. I was twaindy before Ostrog was a baby. I remember him
long before he'd pushed his way to the head of the Wind Vanes Control.
I've seen many changes. Eh! I've worn the blue. And at last I've come to
see this crush and darkness and tumult and dead men carried by in heaps
on the ways. And all his doing! All his doing!"

His voice died away in scarcely articulate praises of Ostrog.

Graham thought. "Let me see," he said, "if I