profitable conclusion.

And yet, he was just turned forty was clear-eyed, calm-hearted,
hearty-pulsed, man-strong; and yet, his history, until he was thirty,
had been harum-scarum and erratic to the superlative. He had run away
from a millionaire home when he was thirteen. He had won enviable
college honors ere he was twenty-one and after that he had known all
the purple ports of the purple seas, and, with cool head, hot heart,
and laughter, played every risk that promised and provided in the wild
world of adventure that he had lived to see pass under the sobriety of
law.

In the old days of San Francisco Forrest had been a name to conjure
with. The Forrest Mansion had been one of the pioneer palaces on Nob
Hill where dwelt the Floods, the Mackays, the Crockers, and the
O'Briens. "Lucky" Richard Forrest, the father, had arrived, via the
Isthmus, straight from old New England, keenly commercial, interested
before his departure in clipper ships and the building of clipper
ships, and interested immediately after his arrival in water-front
real estate, river steamboats, mines, of course, and, later, in the
draining of the Nevada Comstock and the construction of the Southern
Pacific.

He played big, he won big, he lost big; but he won always more than he
lost, and what he paid out at one game with one hand, he drew back
with his other hand at another game. His winnings from the Comstock he
sank into the various holes of the bottomless Daffodil Group in
Eldorado County. The wreckage from the Benicia Line he turned into the
Napa Consolidated, which was a quicksilver venture, and it earned him
five thousand per cent. What he lost in the collapse of the Stockton