Spurrier entered the smoke room and stood for a moment in its threshold.

There were uniforms there, and some men in them whom he had known, though now these other-time acquaintances avoided his eye and the necessity of an embarrassment which must have come from meeting it.

But from an alcove seat near the door rose a stocky gentleman, well groomed and indubitably distinguished of guise, who had been tearing the covering from a bridge deck.

“Spurrier, my boy,” he exclaimed cordially, “I’m glad to see you. I read your name on the list. Won’t you join us?”

This was the man who had rolled away the mountains of official inertia and saved him from prison; who had stipulated with his daughter that she should not write to him in his cell; and who now embraced the first opportunity to greet him publicly with cordial words. Here, reflected the cashiered soldier, was poise more calculated than his own, and he smiled as he shook his head, giving the answer which he knew to be expected of him.

“No, thank you, senator.” Then he added a request: “But if these gentlemen can spare you for a few minutes I would appreciate a word with you.”

“Certainly, my boy.” With a glance about the little 37 company which made his excuses, Beverly rose and linked his arm through Spurrier’s, but when they stood alone on deck that graciousness stiffened immediately into manner more austere.

“I’ve seen Augusta,” began the younger man briefly, “and told her I wouldn’t seek to hold her to her promise. I suppose that meets with your approval?”

The public man, whom rumor credited with presidential aspirations, nodded. “Under the circumstances it is necessary. I may as well be candid. I tried vainly to persuade her to throw you over entirely, but I had to end in a compromise. She agreed not to communicate with you in any manner until your trial came to its conclusion.”

The cashiered officer felt his temples hammering with the surge of indignant blood to his forehead. This man who had so studiedly and successfully feigned genuine pleasure at seeing him, when other eyes were looking on, was telling him now with salamander coolness that he had urged upon his daughter the policy of callous desertion. The impulse toward resentful retort was almost overpowering, but with it came the galling recognition that, except for Beverly’s bull-dog pertinacity, Spurrier himself would have been a life-termer, and that now humility became him better than anger.

“Did you seek to have Augusta throw me over, without even a farewell—because you believed me guilty, sir?” His inquiry came quietly and the older man shook a noncommittal head.

“It’s not so much what I think as what the world will think,” he made even response. “To put it in the kindest words, Spurrier, you rest under a cloud.”

“Senator,” said the other in measured syllables, “I rest, also, under a great weight of obligation to you, but, there were times, sir, when for a note from her I’d willingly have accepted the death penalty.”

“I won’t pretend that I fail to understand—even to sympathize with you,” came the answer. “You must see none the less that I had no alternative. Augusta’s husband must be—well, like CÆsar’s wife.”

“There is nothing more to be said, I think,” admitted Spurrier, and the senator held out his hand.

“In every other matter, I feel only as your friend. It will be better if to other eyes our relations remain cordial. Otherwise my efforts on your behalf would give the busy-bodies food for gossip. That’s what we are both seeking to avoid.”

Spurrier bowed and watched the well-groomed figure disappear.

The cloudless days and the brilliant nights of low-hung stars and phosphor waters were times of memorable opportunity and paradise for other lovers on that steamer. For Spurrier they were purgatorial and when he realized Augusta Beverly’s clearly indicated wish that he should leave her free from the embarrassment of any tete-a-tete, he knew definitely that her silence was as final as words could have made it. The familiar panama hat seen at intervals and the curve of the cheek that he had once been privileged to kiss seemed now to belong to an orbit of life remote from his own with an utterness of distance no less actual because intangible.

The young soldier’s nature, which had been prodigally generous, began to harden into a new and unlovely bitterness. Once he passed her as she leaned 39 on the rail with a young lieutenant who was going to the States on his first leave from Island duty, and when the girl met his eyes and nodded, the cub of an officer looked up—and cut him dead with needless ostentation.

For the old general, who had pretended not to see him, Jack Spurrier had felt only the sympathy due to a man bound and embarrassed by a severe code of etiquette, but with this cocksure young martinet, his hands itched for chastisement.

Throughout the trying voyage Spurrier felt that Snowdon, the engineer, was holding him under an interested sort of observation, and this surveillance he mildly resented, though the entire politeness of the other left him helpless to make his feeling outspoken. But when they had stood off from Honolulu and brought near to completion the last leg of the Pacific voyage, Snowdon invited him into his own stateroom and with candid directness spoke his mind.

“Spurrier,” he began, “I’d like to have a straight talk with you if you will accept my assurance of the most friendly motive.”

Spurrier was not immediately receptive. He sat eying the other for a little while with a slight frown between his eyes, but in the end he nodded.

“I should dislike to seem churlish,” he answered slowly. “But I’ve had my nerves rubbed raw of late, and they haven’t yet grown callous.”

“You see, it’s rather in my line,” suggested Snowdon by way of preface, “to assay the minerals of character in men and to gauge the percentage of pay-dirt that lies in the lodes of their natures. So I’ve watched you, and if you care to have the results of my superficial 40 research, I’m ready to report. No man knows himself until introduced to himself by another, because one can’t see one’s self at sufficient distance to gain perspective.”

Spurrier smiled. “So you’re like the announcer at a boxing match,” he suggested. “You’re ready to say, ‘Plunger Spurrier, shake hands with Jack Spurrier—both members of this club.’”

“Precisely,” assented Snowdon as naturally as though there had been no element of facetiousness in the suggestion. “And now in the first place, what do you mean to do with yourself?”

“I have no idea.”

“I suppose you have thought of the possibilities open to a West Point man—as a soldier of fortune?”

“Yes,” the answer was unenthusiastic. “Thought of them and discarded them.”

“Why?”

The voice laughed and then spoke contemptuously.

“A man’s sword belongs to his flag. It can no more be honorably hired out than a woman’s love. I can see in either only a form of prostitution.”

“Good!” exclaimed Snowdon heartily. “I couldn’t have coached you to a better answer. Are you financially independent?”

“On the contrary, I have nothing. Until now there was my pay and——” He paused there but went on again with a dogged self-forcing. “I might as well confess that the gaming table has always left a balance on my side of the ledger.”

“I haven’t seen you playing since you came aboard.”

“No. I’ve cut that out——”

“Good again—and that brings us to where I stop 41 eliciting information about yourself and begin giving it. I had heard of your gambling exploits before I saw you. I found that you had that cold quality of nerve which a few gamblers have, fewer than are credited with it, by far! Incidentally, it’s precisely the same quality that makes notable generals—and adroit diplomats—if they have the other qualities to support it. It’s sublimated self-control and boldness. You were using it badly, but it was because you were seeking an outlet through the wrong channels. So I studied you, quite impersonally. Your situation on board wasn’t easy or enviable. You knew that eyes followed you and tongues wagged about you with a morbid interest. You saw chatting groups fall abruptly silent when you approached them and officers you had once fraternized with look hurriedly elsewhere. In short, my young friend, you have faced an acid test of ordeal, and you have borne yourself with neither the defiance of braggadocio, nor the visible hint of flinching. If I were looking for a certain type of specialized ability, I should say you had qualified.”

A flush spread on the face of the listener.

“You are indeed introducing me to some one I haven’t known,” he said.

“I know, too,” went on Snowdon, “that there has been a girl—and,” he hastened to add as his companion stiffened, “I mention her only to show you that my observations have not been too superficial. Those qualities which I have catalogued have engaged my attention, because they are rare—rare enough to be profitably capitalized.”

“All this is parable to me, sir.”

“Quite probably. I mean to construe it. There are men who originate or discover great opportunities of industry—and they need capital to bring their plans to fruition—but capital can be approached only through envoys and will receive only ambassadors who can compel recognition. The man who can hope to be successfully accredited to the court of Big Money must possess uncommon attributes. Pinch-beck promoters and plausible charlatans have made cynics of our lords of wealth.”

“What would such a man accomplish,” inquired Spurrier, “aside from a sort of non-resident membership in the association of plutocrats?”

“He would,” declared Snowdon promptly, “help bridge the chasm between the world’s unfinanced achievers, and its unachieving finances.”

“That,” conceded the ex-soldier, “would be worth the doing.”

“John Law at twenty-one built a scheme of finance for Great Britain,” the engineer reminded him. “He could come into the presence of a king and in five minutes the king would urge him to stay. Force and presence can make such an ambassador, and those things are the veins of human ore I’ve assayed in you in paying quantities.”

Spurrier looked across at the strange companion whom chance had thrown across his path with a commotion of pulses which his face in no wise mirrored into outward expression. It had begun to occur to him that if a man is born for an adventurous life even the Articles of War cannot cancel his destiny.

“It would seem,” he suggested casually enough, “that this need of which you speak is for fellows, in 43 finance, who can carry the message to Garcia, as it were. Isn’t that it?”

“That’s it, and messengers to Garcia don’t tramp on each other’s heels. Yet I have spoken of only one phase of the career I’m outlining. It has another side to it as well, if one man is going to unite in himself the whole of the possibility.”

Snowdon broke off there a moment and seemed to be distracted by some thought of his own, but presently he began again.

“My hypothetical man would act largely as a free lance, knocking about the world on a sort of constantly renewed exploration. He would be the prospector hunting gold and the explorer searching for new continents of industrial development, only instead of being just the one or the other he would be a sort of sublimation. His job would sometimes call him into the wildernesses, but more often, I think, his discoveries would lie under the noses of crowds, passed by every day by clever folk who never saw them—clever folk who are not quite clever enough.”

“It would seem to me that those discoveries,” demurred Spurrier thoughtfully, “would come each time to some highly trained technician in some particular line.”

Snowdon shook his head again. “That’s why they have come slowly heretofore,” he declared with conviction. “That man I have in mind is one with a sure nose for the trail and a power of absorbing readily and rapidly what he requires of the other man’s technical knowledge. It’s the policy that Japan has followed as a nation. They let others work the problems out over there—then they appropriate the results. 44 I’m not commending it as a national trait, but for this work it’s the first essential. Having made his discovery, this new type of business man will enlist for it the needful financial support.” He paused again and Spurrier, lighting a fresh cigarette, regarded him through eyes slit-narrowed against the flare of the match.

“He must be a sort of opportunity hound,” continued Snowdon smilingly. “He would go baying across the world in full cry and come back to the kennel at the end of each chase.”

Spurrier laughed. “If you’ll pardon me, sir,” he hazarded, “you make a very bad metaphor. I should fancy that the opportunity hound would do the stillest sort of still hunting.”

The older man smiled and bowed his head affirmatively.

“I accept the amendment. The point is, do I give you the concept of the work?”

“In a broad, extremely sketchy way, I think I get the picture,” replied Spurrier. “But could you give me some sort of illustration that would make it a shade more concrete?”

His companion sat considering the question for a while and at last inquired: “Do you know anything about oil? I mean about its production?”

“I’ve been on the Pennsylvania Railroad, coming west,” testified the former lieutenant. “And I’ve run through ragged hills where on every side, stood clumsy, timber affairs like overgrown windmills from which some victorious Don Quizote had knocked off the whirligigs. Then I’ve read a little of Ida Tarbell.”

“Even that will serve for a sort of background. Now, people in general think of striking oil as they might think of finding money on the sidewalk or of lightning striking a particular spire—as a matter of purest chance. To some extent that idea is correct enough, but the brains of oil production are less haphazard. In the office of a few gentlemen who hold dominion over oil and gas hangs a map drawn by the intelligence department of their general staff. On that map are traced lines not unlike those showing ocean currents, but their arrows point instead to currents far under ground, where runs the crude petroleum, discovered—and undiscovered.”

“Undiscovered?” Spurrier’s brows were lifted in polite incredulity, but his companion nodded decisively.

“Discovered and undiscovered,” he repeated. “Geological surveys told the mapmakers how certain lines and structures ran in tendency. Where went a particular formation of Nature’s masonry, there in probability would go oil. The method was not absolute, I grant you, but neither was it haphazard. Sitting in an office in Pittsburgh a certain man drew on his chart what has since been recognized as the line of the forty-second degree, running definitely from the Pennsylvania fields down through Ohio and into the Appalachian hills of Kentucky—thence west and south. Study your fields in Oklahoma, in old Mexico, and you will find that, widely separated as they are, each of them is marked by a cross on that map, and that each of them lies along the current trend which the Pittsburgh man traced before many of them were touched by a drill.”

“That, surely,” argued Spurrier, “testifies for the highly skilled technician, doesn’t it?”

“So far. I now come to the chance of the opportunity hound. The present fields are spots of production here and there. Between them lie others, virgin to pump or rig. Much of that ground is, of course, barren territory, for even on an acre of proven location dry holes may lie close to gushers; one man’s farm may be a ‘duster’ while his neighbor’s spouts black wealth. But along that charted line run the probabilities.”

Into Spurrier’s eyes stole the gleam of the adventuring spirit that was strong in him.

“It sounds like Robert Louis Stevenson and buried treasure,” he declared with unconcealed enthusiasm, but Snowdon only smiled.

“Remember,” he cautioned, “I’m illustrating—nothing more. Now in the foothills of the Kentucky Cumberlands, for example, some years ago men began finding oil. It lay for the most part in a country where the roads were creek beds—remote from railway facilities. It was an expensive sort of proposition to develop, but the cry of ‘Oil! Oil!’ has never failed to set the pack a-running, and it ran.”

“I don’t remember hearing of that rush,” admitted Spurrier.

“No, I dare say you didn’t. It was a flare-up and a die-down. The men who rushed in, plodded dejectedly out again, poorer by the time they had spent.”

“Then the boom collapsed?”

“It collapsed—but why? Because the gentlemen who hold dominion over oil and gas caucussed and so ordained. They gathered around their map and stuck 47 pins here and there. They said, ‘This oil can come out in two ways only: by pipe line or tank cars. We will stand aloof and develop where the cost is less and the profit greater—and without us, it cannot succeed.’”

“Were there no independent concerns to bring the stuff to market?”

Snowdon laughed. “The gentlemen who hold dominion have their own defenses against competition. You may have heard of a certain dog in the manger? Well, they said as they sat about their table on which the map was spread, ‘Some day other fields may run out. Some day something may set oil soaring until even this yield may be well worth our attention. We will therefore hold this card in reserve against that day and that contingency.’ So quietly, inconspicuously, yet with a power that strangled competition, lobbies operated in State legislatures. The independents failed to secure needful charters—the lines were never laid. Those particular fields starved, and now the ignorant mountaineers who woke for a while to dreams of wealth, laugh at the man who says ‘oil’ to them. Yet at some properly, or improperly designated day, those failure fields will flash on the astonished world as something risen from the dead, and fortunes will blossom for the lucky.”

“Yes?” prompted the listener.

“Now let us suppose our opportunity hound as willing to go unostentatiously into that country; as willing to spend part of each year there for a term of years; nipping options here and there, waiting patiently and watching his chance to slip a charter through one of those bound and gagged legislatures in 48 some moment of relaxed vigilance. Such a man might find himself ultimately standing with the key to the situation in his own hand. It’s just a story, but perhaps it serves to give you my meaning.”

“Did I understand you to suggest,” inquired Spurrier with a forced calmness, “that you fancy you see in me the qualities of your opportunity hound?”

“Our own concern,” said Snowdon quietly, “is fortunate enough to have passed through the period of cooling its heels in the anterooms of capital, but we can still use a man such as I have described. There’s a place for you with us if you want it.”

“When do I go to work?” demanded the former lieutenant rising from his seat, and Snowdon countered:

“When will you be ready to begin?”

“When we dock at ’Frisco,” came the immediate response, “provided I be allowed time for an affair of my own, two months from now. A certain private in my old company will be discharged from the service then. I fancy he’ll land there, and I want to be waiting for him when he steps ashore.”

“A reprisal?” inquired Snowdon in a disappointed tone, but the other shook his head.

“He is the one man through whom there’s a chance of clearing my name,” Spurrier said slowly. “I hope it won’t call for violence.”