Out beyond the barriers of the snow-stifled mountains stretched endless continents and seas inviting his soul.  Men of alien races and alien thought trod lands where palm trees nodded along white beaches and where the sea was blue as sapphire.  Thousands of miles away were deserts agleam with gold and caravans swinging between the burning arch of the sky and the scorching sands.  Great cities rose before his eyes, beckoning him, calling to him:  brooding cities of gray turrets and foggy streets; strange cities lit with sunset fires on domes and minarets; laughing cities gay with festivals.  All these things he was hungry to see; to see as a master of the world walking its varied ways, achieving its affairs.  Through his waking dreams marched a parade of great figures, Hannibal, Caesar the Corsican, Talleyrand, Disraeli, Montagu, Pitt, the men with whom this tongueless voice proclaimed his brotherhood; the men who had found life’s granite as hard as that which lay heaped about him, who had conquered it and chiseled it into monuments of history.  His hand slipped under his pillow and closed on the dollars he had made.  His troubled face smoothed into a smile.

“Slivers Martin paid me ten dollars,” he murmured to himself, “an’ I bought the lot of ’em for seven.”

CHAPTER IV

When young Jefferson Edwardes set out the next morning for his winter’s imprisonment in the shack where he must fight the white specter of slow death, amid the white isolation of the snow, he left behind him a household to all outward seeming as quiet as it had ever been.  But all that morning and afternoon while Ham was away at school, Tom Burton sat deeply engrossed in calculations involving scraps of paper upon which he was laboriously figuring, and frequent consultation of a slender bank-book.  And Ham, as he trudged back across the snow, came with a face set for combat.  Hitherto he had obeyed and now the time had come when his inherent power of leadership must assert itself.  If the world could not conquer him—­and he was utterly certain it could not—­he must not flinch from the task of riding down the first opposition he met—­even though it be the opposition of his own blood.  Afterward his family should know only tenderness and ease and luxury, but now they must acknowledge his mastery.

Of the possibility of failure he never dreamed.  His star was in the heavens and Destiny had spoken.  Just as the cork plunged to the bottom of the pail must inevitably rise to the top, so he must rise.  He was of the oligarchy of the great, of the chosen of the gods, and now the voices of Destiny were calling him to the undertaking of his mission.  Tonight the question must be thrashed out, yet when he arrived at the house he went quietly about the round of monotonous chores and after that sat through the evening meal with no mention of the things in his heart.  It was his father who first broached the subject and he broached it bluntly while the family sat about him, in the spirit of the primitive family council.