One fact worked consistently against the disclosure
of his secret. No one of his larger diamonds remained in the public
eye for a week before being invested with a history of enough
fatalities, amours, revolutions, and wars to have occupied it from the
days of the first Babylonian Empire.
From 1870 until his death in 1900, the history of Fitz-Norman
Washington was a long epic in gold. There were side issues, of
course--he evaded the surveys, he married a Virginia lady, by whom he
had a single son, and he was compelled, due to a series of unfortunate
complications, to murder his brother, whose unfortunate habit of
drinking himself into an indiscreet stupor had several times
endangered their safety. But very other murders stained these happy
years of progress and exspansion.
Just before he died he changed his policy, and with all but a few
million dollars of his outside wealth bought up rare minerals in bulk,
which he deposited in the safety vaults of banks all over the world,
marked as bric-a-brac. His son, Braddock Tarleton Washington, followed
this policy on an even more tensive scale. The minerals were converted
into the rarest of all elements--radium--so that the equivalent of a
billion dollars in gold could be placed in a receptacle no bigger than
a cigar box.
When Fitz-Norman had been dead three years his son, Braddock, decided
that the business had gone far enough.
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