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Rh 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 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 whole 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 any one 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