memory served him right there was something jocose and undignified
about it--something that would not look well in the public prints. He
visited the offices of his lawyers, recovered the amazing instrument,
and forthwith set about to make a new will, bereft of certain grewsome
stipulations but quite as sweeping in purpose as the other had been.
In fact, he left his fortune--as he had done before--to his beloved
nephew, Thomas Singleton Bingle, with three precautionary bequests to
his son and daughters, providing against the contests that were sure
to follow. He bequeathed the sum of one thousand dollars to each of
his children, and he signed his name once more as Joseph H. Hooper--
for the first time in fourteen years.

His wanderings as a tramp--in his own account of himself he used the
word "tramp" with a shocking lack of pride--led him inevitably into
the far Northwest. Men were doing things up there. The country fairly
seethed with the activity of live, virile men who were taking the
first staunch grip upon the tricky wheel of fortune and were turning
it to their own account. Every man was building; no man complained of
conditions, for conditions were so new and so ready to hand that he
who found fault was merely lessening his own chance to secure his
share of the vast resources that spread before him, welcoming the
greedy fingers of him who courted the future and shunned the past. All
men lived in the present out there in the great stretches, and all men
were strong and eager.

Joseph Hooper caught the fever that infected the West. He shook off
the fetters that bound him to a far from enchanted East, and began to
squirm with the first tickling sensations of an ambition that had
never really made itself felt, even in the old days of successful
achievement among men who were content to tread the beaten and