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Swirling Waters by Max Rittenberg
page 48 of 435 (11%)
had stamped an iron heel. The ants fought blindly with one another to
reach the surface--to live. That was the law of life as he saw it--to
fight one's way to the open.

The world he looked upon breathed in money through eager nostrils.
Money was the oxygen of civilization. Without money a man slowly
asphyxiated. It must be every man's ambition to own big money--to
breathe it in himself with full-lunged, lustful, intoxicating gulps, and
to dole it out as master to dependents pleading for their ration of
life. That was the meaning of power: to give or withhold the essentials
of life at one's pleasure.

Consequently he had failed to read the riddle of Matheson's motive at
that crucial interview in the financier's office on the Rue Laffitte. He
had failed to realize that a man might be as eager to give as to grasp.
He had failed to reckon on altruism as a possible dominating factor in
the decisions of a successful man of business.

Further than that, it lay entirely outside Lars Larssen's plane of
thought that a man who had fought his way up to worldly success from a
clerk's stool in a Montreal broker's office, who had made himself a
power in the world of London and Paris finance, could voluntarily give
up money and power and bury himself in obscurity.

Larssen judged that Matheson had been murdered and robbed by the
_apaches_. It was possible, though extremely improbable, that he might
have committed suicide. Which it was, mattered nothing to the shipowner.
But he did not dream for one instant that Matheson might have thrown up
place and power to disappear into voluntary exile.

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