e--she tossed her pretty red gold head and waved him
a kiss. Then she walked away with rich, sinuous, healthy strides--the
type that men turn to look after.

"That's her--that's that Butler girl," observed one railroad clerk to
another. "Gee! a man wouldn't want anything better than that, would
he?"

It was the spontaneous tribute that passion and envy invariably pay to
health and beauty. On that pivot swings the world.

Never in all his life until this trip had Cowperwood been farther west
than Pittsburg. His amazing commercial adventures, brilliant as they
were, had been almost exclusively confined to the dull, staid world of
Philadelphia, with its sweet refinement in sections, its pretensions to
American social supremacy, its cool arrogation of traditional
leadership in commercial life, its history, conservative wealth,
unctuous respectability, and all the tastes and avocations which these
imply. He had, as he recalled, almost mastered that pretty world and
made its sacred precincts his own when the crash came. Practically he
had been admitted. Now he was an Ishmael, an ex-convict, albeit a
millionaire. But wait! The race is to the swift, he said to himself
over and over. Yes, and the battle is to the strong. He would test
whether the world would trample him under foot or no.

Chicago, when it finally dawned on him, came with a rush on the second
morning. He had spent two nights in the gaudy Pullman then provided--a
car intended to make up for some of the inconveniences of its
arrangements by an over-elaboration of plush and tortured glass--when
the first lone outposts of the prairie metropolis began to appear. The
side-tracks along the road-bed over which he was speeding became more
and more numerous, the telegraph-poles more and more hung with arms and
strung smoky-thick with wires. In the far distance, cityward, was,
here and there, a lone working-man's cottage, the home of some
adventurous soul who had planted his bare hut thus far out in order to
reap the small but certain advantage which the growth of the city would
bring.

The land was flat--as flat as a table--with a waning growth of brown
grass left over from the previous year, and stirring faintly in the
morning breeze. Underneath were signs of the new green--the New Year's
flag of its disposition. For some reason a crystalline atmosphere
enfolded the distant hazy outlines of the city, holding the latter like
a fly in amber and giving i