Although every man has been called upon to make a personal sacrifice there is none who makes a greater one than he. It is not alone the relinquishment of his position in the world as a patient and industrious worker; his sacrifice of love; the obliteration of his hope for preferment, but the extinction of life itself at an age when all men cherish it most highly.
Nevins is in the heyday of manhood; his forty years and six having been spent in the perfection of his mental and physical forces. He is equipped with a quick, perceptive brain that grasps the intricacies of a problem almost intuitively; his logic is profound. Years of study have made his mind a storehouse of knowledge.
To Nevins, in the allotment of the proscribed, has fallen the head of the money trust, a multi-millionaire banker, a financial Magnate known throughout the civilized world as the most rapacious miser on record. This man has repeatedly shown that he has no regard for honesty of purpose, and his moral appreciation is imperceptible. To recount the deeds of cunning, of fraud, of gigantic robbery that he has committed in his relentless quest for wealth, would be to retell the story of wrecked railroads, enormously profitable bond issues and Wall street panics of the past decade. The obituaries of the hundreds he has ruined afford the best method of arriving at a partial conception of his power for evil.
"What a privilege to rid the world of this genius of evil!" is Nevins's inward comment as he reads the fatal slip and sees that upon him has fallen the lot to execute the sentence of annihilation upon James Golding, the King of Wall street.
CHAPTER XX.
IN THE ENEMY'S STRONGHOLD.
After an absence of weeks, during which time Harvey Trueman carries the war into the very heart of the Magnates' strongholds, he returns to Chicago. His first mission is to visit Sister Martha. She had been kept in touch with his movements by short notes and aggravatingly brief telegrams, which he sent her as occasion permitted. In the papers she finds but meagre notice of the progress which the Independence party is making, for the censor of the press has effectually silenced all the important mediums. The News Associations, even, are brought under the ban and are given to understand that a violation of the orders of the Plutocratic Party will mean a forfeiture of all privileges of transportation to papers using the offensive news.
The meeting of these two ardent patriots is fraught with emotion. Trueman is the more moved by reason of the knowledge that he is regarded by Martha as the embodiment of all virtue, wisdom and power. He feels his incapacity to fill this exalted role, especially as the unrequited love he bears for Ethel Purdy is still burning in his heart.
"You do not seem yourself to-night," Martha tells him frankly.
"No, that is true; I have so much to think about; so many details to keep in mind that I suffer from abstraction when I am not under the stress of actual labor."