When he had been only eighteen years of age he had married Margaret Hogan, because she was a stout strong hard-working wench, and had at once taken a steerage ticket to New York.
When he reached the United States he had gone straightway to the new settlements in North Dakota, where cities consisted of plank-walks and shingle-roof shanties, and where the inhabitants of those cities were rougher and ruder even than himself. He had scent for wealth as a thirsty steer for distant water-springs, and he said to himself: “I won’t leave off till I’m second to Jay Gould.”
He began very modestly by employing himself as a pig-sticker and opening a pork shop in a town called Kerosene. His wife made and fried sausages to perfection. The shop became a popular resort, and, in the back room, miners, diggers, cattlemen, and all the roughs for miles around came to eat sausages, and found drinks, hot as flame, and play ad libitum. Sometimes they staked nuggets, and lost them.
William Massarene never played, he only watched the gamblers, and when they wanted money lent it to them, or if they sold a nugget bought it. They were a wild lot who cared neither for man nor devil; but he knew how to keep them in order with his cold grey eyes and his good six-shooter. Many swore that they would kill him or rob him; but nobody ever did either, though several tried to do both.
His wife was liked; hard-worked as she was she found time to do a good turn to sick neighbors unknown to him; and more than one rough fellow spared him because she had been kind to his kids or had brought some broth to his girl. The sausage-shop in dreary, dirty, plank-made Kerosene City was the foundation of his fortune.
How the place had stunk and how it had reeked with tobacco stench and echoed with foul outcries and the blows and shots of ruined and reckless men! Margaret Massarene often dreamt of it, and when she did so dream, woke, bathed in sweat, and filled with nameless terror.
Her husband never dreamed, except when wide-awake and of his own glories.
Kerosene City had long outgrown its infancy of planks and shingles, and had expanded into a huge town crammed with factories, and tall houses, tramways and elevators and churches, sky-scraping roofs, electric railways, chemical works, fire-belching foundries, hissing, screaming, vomiting machinery, and all the many joys of modern and American civilization.
But Kerosene City, most of it Mr. Massarene’s property, was but an item in the Massarene property. He had been in many trades and many speculations; he owned railway plant and cattle ranches and steam-boats and grain-depots, and docks and tramways and manufactories, and men and women and children labored for him day and night by thousands harder than the Israelites toiled for the Pharaohs.
Everything turned to gold that he touched. He bought for little with prodigious insight and sold for much with the same intuition. No foolish scruples hampered his acquisitiveness, no weak-minded compassion ever arrested him on any road which led to his own advantage. He had never been known to relent or to regret, to give except in ostentation, or to stir a step unless self-interest suggested and self-recompense awaited it. Herbert Spencer has said that kindness and courtesy are indispensable to success: William Massarene knew better than that philosopher. He had lived amongst men, and not amongst books. In the land of his adoption his fellows feared him as they feared no one else; his few short hard words cut them like the knotted lash of an overseer’s whip. He was dreaded, obeyed, hated: that was all the feeling he cared to excite.