“If this is the same person, he used to live at Rivervale.  Came there, no one knew where from, and lived with his mother, a little withered old woman, on a little cleared patch up in the hills, in a comfortable sort of shanty.  She used to come to the village with herbs and roots to sell.  Nobody knew whether she was a gypsy or a decayed lady, she had such an air, and the children were half afraid of her, as a sort of witch.  Murad went to school, and occasionally worked for some farmer, but nobody knew him; he rarely spoke to any one, and he had the reputation of being a perfect devil; his only delight seemed to be in doing some dare-devil feat to frighten the children.  We used to say that Murad Ault would become either a pirate or—­”

“Broker,” suggested Mr. Mavick, with a smile.

“I didn’t know much about brokers at that time,” Philip hastened to say, and then laughed himself at his escape from actual rudeness.

“What became of him?”

“Oh, he just disappeared.  After I went away to school I heard that his mother had died, and Murad had gone off—­gone West it was said.  Nothing was ever heard of him.”

The advent and rise of Murad Ault in New York was the sort of phenomenon to which the metropolis, which picks up its great men as Napoleon did his marshals, is accustomed.  The mystery of his origin, which was at first against him, became at length an element of his strength and of the fear he inspired, as a sort of elemental force of unknown power.  Newspaper biographies of him constantly appeared, but he had evaded every attempt to include him and his portrait in the Lives of Successful Men.  The publishers of these useful volumes for stimulating speculation and ambition did not dare to take the least liberties with Murad Ault.

The man was like the boy whom Philip remembered.  Doubtless he appreciated now as then the value of the mystery that surrounded his name and origin; and he very soon had a humorous conception of the situation that made him decline to be pilloried with others in one of those volumes, which won from a reviewer the confession that “lives of great men all remind us we may make our lives sublime.”  One of the legends current about him was that he first appeared in New York as a “hand” on a canal-boat, that he got employment as a check-clerk on the dock, that he made the acquaintance of politicians in his ward, and went into politics far enough to get a city contract, which paid him very well and showed him how easily a resolute man could get money and use it in the city.  He was first heard of in Wall Street as a curbstone broker, taking enormous risks and always lucky.  Very soon he set up an office, with one clerk or errand-boy, and his growing reputation for sagacity and boldness began to attract customers; his ventures soon engaged the attention of guerrillas like himself, who were wont to consult him.  They found that his advice was generally sound, and that he had not only sensitiveness but prescience about the state of the market.  His office was presently enlarged, and displayed a modest sign of “Murad Ault, Banker and Broker.”