Keith, indeed, moved about almost in a trance, absorbing and enjoying the sights.  It was Humanity in flood; Life at full tide.

Many a woman and not a few men turned to take a second look at the tanned, eager face and straight, supple figure, as, with smiling, yet keen eyes, he stalked along with the free, swinging gait caught on the mountains, so different from the quick, short steps of the city man.  Beggars, and some who from their look and apparel might not have been beggars, applied to him so often that he said to one of them, a fairly well-dressed man with a nose of a slightly red tinge: 

“Well, I must have a very benevolent face or a very credulous one!”

“You have,” said the man, with brazen frankness, pocketing the half-dollar given him on his tale of a picked pocket and a remittance that had gone wrong.

Keith laughed and passed on.

Meantime, Keith was making some discoveries.  He did not at first call on Norman Wentworth.  He had a feeling that it might appear as if he were using his friendship for a commercial purpose.  He presented his business letters.  His letters, however, failed to have the weight he had expected.  The persons whom he had met down in New Leeds, during their brief visits there, were, somehow, very different when met in New York.  Some whom he called on were civil enough to him; but as soon as he broached his business they froze up.  The suggestion that he had coal-property to sell sent them down to zero.  Their eyes would glint with a shrewd light and their faces harden into ice.  One or two told him plainly that they had no money to embark in “wild-cat schemes.”

Mr. Creamer of Creamer, Crustback & Company, Capitalists, a tall, broad-shouldered man, with a strongly cut nose and chin and keen, gray eyes, that, through long habitude, weighed chances with an infallible appraisement, to whom Keith had a letter from an acquaintance, one of those casual letters that mean anything or nothing, informed him frankly that he had “neither time nor inclination to discuss enterprises, ninety-nine out of every hundred of which were frauds, and the hundredth generally a failure.”

“This is not a fraud,” said Keith, hotly, rising.  “I do not indorse frauds, sir.”  He began to draw on his gloves.  “If I cannot satisfy any reasonable man of the fact I state, I am willing to fail.  I ought to fail.”  With a bow, he turned to the door.

Something in Keith’s assurance went further with the shrewd-eyed capitalist than his politeness had done.  He shot a swift glance as he was retiring toward the door.

“Why didn’t Wickersham make money down there?” he demanded, half in query, half in denial, gazing keenly over his gold-rimmed glasses.  “He usually makes money, even if others lose it.”

Mr. Creamer had his own reasons for not liking Wickersham.

Keith was standing at the door.

“For two or three reasons.  One was that he underestimated the people who live down there, and thought he could force them into selling him their lands, and so lost the best properties there.”