ranch owner in the Far West. Chase never counted on probabilities; he
took what came and was satisfied.

After leaving college, he drifted pretty much over the world, taking pot
luck with fortune and clasping the hand of circumstance, to be led into
the highways and byways, through good times and ill times, in love and
out, always coming safely into port with a smiling wind behind. There
had been hard roads to travel as well as easy ones, but he never
complained; he swung on through life with the heart of a soldier and the
confidence of a Pagan. He loathed business and he abhorred trade.

"That little old trust fund is making more money for me by lying idle
than I could accumulate in a century by hard work as a grocer or an
undertaker," he was prone to philosophise when his uncles, who were
merchants, urged him to settle down and "do something." Not that there
were grocers or undertakers among them; it was his way of impressing his
sense of freedom upon them.

He was an orphan and bounden to no man. No one had the right to question
his actions after his twenty-first anniversary. It was fortunate for him
that he was a level-headed as well as a wild-hearted chap, else he might
have sunk to the perdition his worthy uncles prescribed for him. He went
in for law at Yale, and then practised restlessly, vaguely for two years
in Baltimore, under the patronage of his father's oldest friend, a
lawyer of distinction.

"If I fail at everything else, I'll go back to the practice of law," he
said cheerfully. "Uncle Henry is mean enough to say that he has
forgotten more law than I ever knew, but he has none the better of me.
'Gad, I am confident that I've forgotten more law, myself, than I ever