Losing sight of the irresistible energy and momentum of wealth as wealth, men said that fortune favored him from the outset. It was only a half-truth, but it sufficed to account for what was really a campaign of conquest. Grierson's touch was Midas-like, turning all things to gold; and even in Wahaska there were Mammon worshippers enough to hail him as a public benefactor whose wealth and enterprise would shortly make of the overgrown village a town, and of the town a thriving city.
Since the time was ripe, Wahaska did presently burst its swaddling-bands. Commercial enterprise is sheep-like; where one leads, others will follow; and the mere following breeds success, if only by the sheer impetus of the massed forward movement. Jasper Grierson was the man of the hour, but the price paid for leadership by the led is apt to be high. When Wahaska became a city, with a charter and a bonded debt, electric lights, water-works, and a trolley system, Grierson's interest predominated in every considerable business venture in it, save and excepting the Raymer Foundry and Machine Works.
He was the president of one bank, and the principal stockholder in the other, which was practically an allied institution; he was the sole owner of the grain elevator, the saw- and planing-mills, the box factory, and a dozen smaller industries in which his name did not appear. Also, it was his money, or rather his skill as a promoter, which had transformed the Wahaska & Pineboro Railroad from a logging switch, built to serve the saw-mill, into an important and independent connecting link in the great lake region system.
In each of these commercial or industrial chariots the returned native sat in the driver's seat; and those who remembered him as a loutish young farmhand overlooked the educative results of continued success and marvelled at his gifts, wondering how and where he had acquired them.
While the father was thus gratifying a purely Gothic lust for conquest, the daughter figured, in at least one small circle, as a beautiful young Vandal, with a passion for overturning all the well-settled traditions. At first her attitude toward Wahaska and the Wahaskans had been serenely tolerant; the tolerance of the barbarian who neither understands, nor sympathizes with, the homely virtues and the customs which have grown out of them. Then resentment awoke, and with it a soaring ambition to reconstruct the social fabric of the countrified town upon a model of her own devising.