t as he drove in his cab to his office in the Rue
Laffitte. The words carried him back to a forest-clearing in the
backwoods of Ontario, where he and his half-brother had made holiday
camp some eighteen years before. They were comparing ambitions--two
young men unusually alike in features but very different in temperament
and will-power. John Riviere, the elder of the two, was dreaming of fame
in the paths of science--he had worked his way through M'Gill University
and was hoping for a demonstratorship to keep him in living expenses.
Clifford Matheson, a clerk in a broker's office, planned his life in
terms of cities and money. "To make big money--that's what I call
success."

In the rapids of the stream by their feet was a swirl of waters covering
a sunken rock, and Riviere had thrown on to it a chip of wood. The chip
was whirled round and round, nearer and nearer to the centre, until
finally it was sucked under with a sudden extinguishment.

"There's the life you plan," he had said to Clifford....

CHAPTER II

A L5,000,000 DEAL

When Matheson reached his office, he was told by a clerk that Mr Lars
Larssen was already waiting to see him. He threw off his gloves and
fur-lined coat and adjusted the lights before he answered that his
visitor could be shown in. He added that the clerk could lock up his own
rooms and leave, as he would not be wanted any longer that evening.

There was a quiet simplicity in Matheson's office that one would
scarcely associate with the operations of high finance. One might have
looked for costly furnishings and an atmosphere redolent of big money.
Yet here was a simple rosewood desk with a bowl of mimosa on it, and
around the walls were a few simple landscapes from recent _salons_.

If Lars Larssen were a magic name to Sir Francis Letchmere, it was a
magic name also to many other men of affairs. From cabin-boy to
millionaire shipowner was his story in brief. But that does not tell one
quarter. The son of Scandinavian immigrants to the States,
factory-workers, he had run away to sea at the age of fourteen, with the
call of the ocean ringing in his ears from the Viking inheritance that
was his. But on this was superposed the fierce desire for success that
formed the psychical atmosphere of the new American environment. As a
boy in the smoke-blackened factory town, he had breathed in the longing
to make money--big money--to use men to his own ends, to be a master of
masters.

Wi