CONTENTS
| CHAPTER I | [1] |
| CHAPTER II | [11] |
| CHAPTER III | [22] |
| CHAPTER IV | [42] |
| CHAPTER V | [56] |
| CHAPTER VI | [70] |
| CHAPTER VII | [85] |
| CHAPTER VIII | [101] |
| CHAPTER IX | [115] |
| CHAPTER X | [127] |
| CHAPTER XI | [140] |
| CHAPTER XII | [157] |
| CHAPTER XIII | [169] |
| CHAPTER XIV | [192] |
| CHAPTER XV | [206] |
| CHAPTER XVI | [222] |
| CHAPTER XVII | [239] |
| CHAPTER XVIII | [250] |
| CHAPTER XIX | [271] |
| CHAPTER XX | [290] |
| CHAPTER XXI | [304] |
| CHAPTER XXII | [326] |
| CHAPTER XXIII | [342] |
| CHAPTER XXIV | [353] |
| CHAPTER XXV | [368] |
| CHAPTER XXVI | [381] |
| CHAPTER XXVII | [392] |
| CHAPTER XXVIII | [401] |
| CHAPTER XXIX | [414] |
| CHAPTER XXX | [430] |
| CHAPTER XXXI | [440] |
| CHAPTER XXXII | [452] |
| CHAPTER XXXIII | [467] |
| CHAPTER XXXIV | [478] |
| CHAPTER XXXV | [490] |
| CHAPTER XXXVI | [509] |
THE OPEN QUESTION
CHAPTER I
It is not always easy to trace the origin of an American family, even when the immediate progenitor did not begin life as a boot-black or a prospector, without so much as a "grub stake." The Ganos had been people of some education and some means—clergymen, merchants going to and from the West Indies, or home-keeping planters in the South—for the little space of a hundred years before the Civil War. Further back than that—darkness.
Whether the name was of Huguenot, Flemish, Italian, or other origin, the Ganos themselves, like thousands of families of consequence in America, never pretended to know. Only one of the race ever evinced the least disposition to care.