mat), he was compelled
to make the best of his talents, no matter to what test they were put.
He left college at twenty-two, possessed of the praiseworthy design to
earn his own way without recourse to the $4,500 income from a certain
trust fund. His plan also incorporated the hope to save every penny of
that income for the possible "rainy day." He was now thirty; in each of
several New York banks he had something like $4,000 drawing three per
cent. interest while he picked his blithe way through the world on
$2,500 a year, more or less, as chance ordained.

"When I'm forty," Chase was wont to remark to envious spendthrifts who
couldn't understand his philosophy, "I'll have over a hundred thousand
there, and if I live to be ninety, just think what I'll have! And it
will be like finding the money, don't you see? Of course, I won't live
to be ninety. Moreover, I may get married and have to maintain a poor
wife with rich relatives, which is a terrible strain, you know. You have
to live up to your wife's relatives, if you don't do anything else."

He did not refer to the chance that he was quite sure to come in for a
large legacy at the death of his maternal grandfather, a millionaire
ranch owner in the Far West. Chase never counted on probabilities; he
took what came and was satisfied.

After leaving college, he drifted pretty much over the world, taking pot
luck with fortune and clasping the hand of circumstance, to be led into
the highways and byways, through good times and ill times, in love and
out, always coming safely into port with a smiling wind behind. There
had been hard roads to travel as well as easy ones, but he never
complained; he swung on through life with the heart of a soldier and the
confidence of a Pagan. He loathed business and he abhorred trade.

"That little old trust fund is making more money for me by lying idle
than I could accumulate in a century by hard work as a grocer or an
undertaker," he was prone to philosophise when his uncles, who were
merchants, urged him to settle down and "do something." Not that there
were grocers or undertakers among them; it was his way of impressing his
sense of freedom upon them.

He was an orphan and bounden to no man. No one had the right to question
his actions after his twenty-first anniversary. It was fortunate for him
that he was a level-headed as well as a wild-hearted chap, else he might
have sunk to the perdition his worthy uncles prescribed for him.