e, the ever widening circles of ridicule and
contempt--Society, with all its hangers-on and parasites, its imitators
and admirers!

And some one had defied all that--some one had taken up the sword and
gone forth to beat down that opposition! Montague looked at this little
family of four, and wondered which of them was the driving force in
this most desperate emprise!

He arrived at it by a process of elimination. It could not be Evans
himself. One saw that the old man was quite hopeless socially; nothing
could change his big hairy hands or his lean scrawny neck, or his
irresistible impulse to slide down in his chair and cross his long legs
in front of him. The face and the talk of Jack Evans brought
irresistibly to mind the mountain trail and the prospector's pack-mule,
the smoke of camp-fires and the odour of bacon and beans. Seventeen
long years the man had tramped in deserts and mountain wildernesses,
and Nature had graven her impress deep into his body and soul.

He was very shy at this dinner; but Montague came to know him well in
the course of time. And after he had come to realize that Montague was
not one of the grafters, he opened up his heart. Evans had held on to
his mine when he had found it, and he had downed the rivals who had
tried to take it away from him, and he had bought the railroads who had
tried to crush him--and now he had come to Wall Street to fight the men
who had tried to ruin his railroads. But through it all, he had kept
the heart of a woman, and the sight of real distress was unbearable to
him. He was the sort of man to keep a roll of ten-thousand-dollar bills
in his pistol pocket, and to give one away if he thought he could do it
without offence. And, on the other hand, men told how once when he had
seen a porter insult a woman passenger on his line, he jumped up and
pulled the bell-cord, and had the man put out on the roadside at
midnight, thirty miles from the nearest town!

No, it was the women folks, he said to Montague, with his grim laugh.
It didn't trouble him at all to be called a "noovoo rich"; and when he
felt like dancing a shakedown, he could take a run out to God's
country. But the women folks had got the bee in their bonnet. The old
man added sadly that one of the disadvantages of striking it rich was
that it left the women folks with nothing to do.

Nor was it Mrs. Evans, either. "Sarey," as she was called by the head
of the house, sat next to Montague at dinner; and h