“I’m not saying Americans aren’t clever; they are ten times cleverer than we are, as a nation; but I never met another who showed such a degree of sagacity and foresight, such gifts of memory and mental tenacity, such sheer force of intelligence, as there was behind everything Manderson did in his moneymaking career. They called him the ‘Napoleon of Wall Street’ often enough in the papers; but few people knew so well as I did how much truth there was in the phrase. He seemed never to forget a fact that might be of use to him, in the first place; and he did systematically with the business facts that concerned him what Napoleon did, as I have read, with military facts. He studied them in special digests which were prepared for him at short intervals, and which he always had at hand, so that he could take up his report on coal or wheat or railways, or whatever it might be, in any unoccupied moment. Then he could make a bolder and cleverer plan than any man of them all. People got to know that Manderson would never do the obvious thing, but they got no further; the thing he did do was almost always a surprise, and much of his success flowed from that. The Street got rattled, as they used to put it, when it was known that the old man was out with his gun, and often his opponents seemed to surrender as easily as Colonel Crockett’s coon in the story. The scheme I am going to describe to you would have occupied most men long enough. Manderson could have plotted the thing, down to the last detail, while he shaved himself.
“I used to think that his strain of Indian blood, remote as it was, might have something to do with the cunning and ruthlessness of the man. Strangely enough, its existence was unknown to anyone but himself and me. It was when he asked me to apply my taste for genealogical work to his own obscure family history that I made the discovery that he had in him a share of the blood of the Iroquois chief Montour and his French wife, a terrible woman who ruled the savage politics of the tribes of the Wilderness two hundred years ago. The Mandersons were active in the fur trade on the Pennsylvanian border in those days, and more than one of them married Indian women. Other Indian blood than Montour’s may have descended to Manderson, for all I can say, through previous and subsequent unions; some of the wives’ antecedents were quite untraceable, and there were so many generations of pioneering before the whole country was brought under civilization. My researches left me with the idea that there is a very great deal of the aboriginal blood present in the genealogical makeup of the people of America, and that it is very widely spread. The newer families have constantly intermarried with the older, and so many of them had a strain of the native in them—and were often rather proud of it, too, in those days. But Manderson had the idea about the disgracefulness of mixed blood, which grew much stronger, I fancy, with the rise of the Negro question after the war. He was thunderstruck at what I told him, and was anxious to conceal it from every soul. Of course I never gave it away while he lived, and I don’t think he supposed I would; but I have thought since that his mind took a turn against me from that time onward. It happened about a year before his death.”
“Had Manderson,” asked Mr. Cupples, so unexpectedly that the others started, “any definable religious attitude?”
Marlowe considered a moment. “None that ever I heard of,” he said. “Worship and prayer were quite unknown to him, so far as I could see, and I never heard him mention religion. I should doubt if he had any real sense of God at all, or if he was capable of knowing God through the emotions. But I understood that as a child he had had a religious upbringing with a strong moral side to it. His private life was, in the usual limited sense, blameless. He was almost ascetic in his habits, except as to smoking. I lived with him four years without ever knowing him to tell a direct verbal falsehood, constantly as he used to practise deceit in other forms. Can you understand the soul of a man who never hesitated to take steps that would have the effect of hoodwinking people, who would use every trick of the markets to mislead, and who was at the same time scrupulous never to utter a direct lie on the most insignificant matter? Manderson was like that, and he was not the only one. I suppose you might compare the state of mind to that of a soldier who is personally a truthful man, but who will stick at nothing to deceive the enemy. The rules of the game allow it; and the same may be said of business as many business men regard it. Only with them it is always wartime.”
“It is a sad world,” observed Mr. Cupples.
“As you say,” Marlowe agreed. “Now I was saying that one could always take Manderson’s word if he gave it in a definite form. The first time I ever heard him utter a downright lie was on the night
