perfect health, pure happiness, when I did not have a thousand all told.  Now I have fifty millions, and I know how to get fifty or five hundred and fifty more any time I care to take them, and I have only physical and mental hell.  No beggar in all the world is so poor in happiness as I. Tell me, tell me, Jim, in the name of God, if there is one—­for already the game of gold is robbing me of my faith in God—­where can I buy a little, just a little happiness with all this cursed yellow dirt?  What will it get me in the next world, Jim Randolph, what will it get me?  If I had died when I was poor, I think you will agree with me that, if there is a heaven, I should have stood an even chance of getting there.  Now on a day like to-day, when you see the results of my work, the results of my handling of unlimited gold, you must agree that if I were taken off I should stand more than an even show of landing in hell where the sulphur is thickest and the flames are hottest.”

We were at the entrance of Randolph & Randolph’s office as he poured out this terrible torrent of bitterness.  He glared at me as a dungeon prisoner might glare at his keeper for his answer to “Where can I find liberty?” I had no words to answer him.  As I noted the awful changes his new life was making in every line of his face, the rigid hardness, the haunted, nervous look of desperation, which seemed a forerunner of madness, I could not see, either, where his millions brought any happiness.  His hair, which once was smooth and orderly, hung over his forehead in an unparted mass of tangled curls, and here and there showed a streak of white.  Bob Brownley was still handsome, even more fascinating than before the mercury entered his soul, but it was that wild, awful beauty of the caged lion, lashing himself into madness with memories of his lost freedom.

“Jim,” he went on, when he saw I could not answer, “I guess you don’t know where I can swap the yellow mud for balm of Gilead.  I won’t bother you with my troubles any longer.  I will go up-town and see the little girl whose happiness Tom Reinhart needed in his business.  I will go up and show her the pictures in this week’s Collier’s of the fine hospital for incurables that Reinhart has so generously and nobly built at a cost of two and a half millions!  The little girl may think better of Reinhart when she knows that her father’s money was put to such good use.  Who knows but the great finance king may dedicate it as the ‘Judge Lee Sands Home’ and carve over the entrance a bas-relief of her father, mother, and sister with Hope, Faith, and Charity coming from the mouths of their hanging severed heads?”