st the barest facts to let me know that he was not a man
to do things half-heartedly, or to drop a project until he had carried
it through either to a successful issue, or to indisputable defeat.

And what a life that man had lived! He had been a youth of promise,
keen of intelligence and quick of wit. He had spent two years at a
college in the Middle West back in the early sixties. He had left his
course uncompleted to enter the army, and he had followed the fortunes
of war through the latter part of the great rebellion. At the close of
the war he went West. He farmed in Kansas until the drought and the
grasshoppers urged him on. He joined the first surveying party that
picked out the line of the transcontinental railroad that was to follow
the southern route along the old Santa Fe trail. He carried the chain
and worked the transit across the Rockies, across the desert, across the
Sierras, until, with his companions, he had--

"led the iron stallions down to drink
Through the canons to the waters of the West."

And when this task was accomplished, he followed the lure of the gold
through the California placers; eastward again over the mountains to the
booming Nevada camp, where the Comstock lode was already turning out the
wealth that was to build a half-dozen colossal fortunes. He "prospected"
through this country, with varying success, living the life of the
camps,--rich in its experiences, vivid in its coloring, calling forth
every item of energy and courage and hardihood that a man could command.
Then word came by that mysterious wireless and keyless telegraphy of the
mountains and the desert,--word that back to the eastward, ore deposits
of untold wealth had been discovered. So eastward once more, with the
stampede of the miners, he turned his face. He was successful at the
outset in this new region. He quickly accumulated a fortune; he lost it
and amassed another; lost that and still gained a third. Five successive
fortunes he made successively, and successively he lost them. But during
this time he had become a man of power and influence in the community.
He married and raised a family and saw his children comfortably settled.

But when his last fortune was swept away, the old _Wanderlust_ again
claimed its own. Houses and lands and mortgages and mills and mines had
slipped from his grasp. But it mattered little. He had only himself to
care for, and, with pick and pan strapped to his saddlebow, he set hi