thing and held revival services immediately.

Fitz-Norman himself set out for foreign parts with one hundred
thousand dollars and two trunks filled with rough diamonds of all
sizes. He sailed for Russia in a Chinese junk, and six months after
his departure from Montana he was in St. Petersburg. He took obscure
lodgings and called immediately upon the court jeweller, announcing
that he had a diamond for the Czar. He remained in St. Petersburg for
two weeks, in constant danger of being murdered, living from lodging
to lodging, and afraid to visit his trunks more than three or four
times during the whole fortnight.

On his promise to return in a year with larger and finer stones, he
was allowed to leave for India. Before he left, however, the Court
Treasurers had deposited to his credit, in American banks, the sum of
fifteen million dollars--under four different aliases.

He returned to America in 1868, having been gone a little over two
years. He had visited the capitals of twenty-two countries and talked
with five emperors, eleven kings, three princes, a shah, a khan, and a
sultan. At that time Fitz-Norman estimated his own wealth at one
billion dollars. One fact worked consistently against the disclosure
of his secret. No one of his larger diamonds remained in the public
eye for a week before being invested with a history of enough
fatalities, amours, revolutions, and wars to have occupied it from the
days of the first Babylonian Empire.

From 1870 until his death in 1900, the history of Fitz-Norman
Washington was a long epic in gold. There were side issues, of
course--he evaded the surveys, he married a Virginia lady, by whom he
had a single son, and he was compelled, due to a series of unfortunate
complications, to murder his brother, whose unfortunate habit of
drinking himself into an indiscreet stupor had several times
endangered their safety. But very few other murders stained these happy
years of progress and expansion.

Just before he died he changed his policy, and with all but a few
million dollars of his outside wealth bought up rare minerals in bulk,
which he deposited in the safety vaults of banks all over the world,
marked as bric-a-brac. His son, Braddock Tarleton Washington, followed
this policy on an even more tensive scale. The minerals were converted
into the rarest of all elements--radium--so that the equivalent of a
billion dollars in gold could be placed in a receptacle no bigger than
a cigar