enice
LVII Aileen's Last Card
LVIII A Marauder Upon the Commonwealth
LIX Capital and Public Rights
LX The Net
LXI The Cataclysm
LXII The Recompense

Chapter I

The New City

When Frank Algernon Cowperwood emerged from the Eastern District
Penitentiary in Philadelphia he realized that the old life he had lived
in that city since boyhood was ended. His youth was gone, and with it
had been lost the great business prospects of his earlier manhood. He
must begin again.

It would be useless to repeat how a second panic following upon a
tremendous failure--that of Jay Cooke & Co.--had placed a second
fortune in his hands. This restored wealth softened him in some
degree. Fate seemed to have his personal welfare in charge. He was
sick of the stock-exchange, anyhow, as a means of livelihood, and now
decided that he would leave it once and for all. He would get in
something else--street-railways, land deals, some of the boundless
opportunities of the far West. Philadelphia was no longer pleasing to
him. Though now free and rich, he was still a scandal to the
pretenders, and the financial and social world was not prepared to
accept him. He must go his way alone, unaided, or only secretly so,
while his quondam friends watched his career from afar. So, thinking
of this, he took the train one day, his charming mistress, now only
twenty-six, coming to the station to see him off. He looked at her
quite tenderly, for she was the quintessence of a certain type of
feminine beauty.

"By-by, dearie," he smiled, as the train-bell signaled the approaching
departure. "You and I will get out of this shortly. Don't grieve.
I'll be back in two or three weeks, or I'll send for you. I'd take you
now, only I don't know how that country is out there. We'll fix on some
place, and then you watch me settle this fortune question. We'll not
live under a cloud always. I'll get a divorce, and we'll marry, and
things will come right with a bang. Money will do that."

He looked at her with his large, cool, penetrating eyes, and she
clasped his cheeks between her hands.

"Oh, Frank," she exclaimed, "I'll miss you so! You're all I have."

"In two weeks," he smiled, as the train began to move, "I'll wire or be
back. Be good, sweet."

She followed him with adoring eyes--a fool of love, a spoiled child, a
family pet, amorous, eager, affectionate, the type so strong a man
would naturally lik