THE PILLOW OF FORTUNE A Tale of the Gilded Age —————  •  ————— CHAPTER I In Which the Reader Makes the Acquaintance of a Man Who Has Nothing But Debts and Ambitions If you have ever found yourself in Rawlins, Wyoming, in the winter of 1887, with seventeen dollars in your pocket, a railroad ticket to nowhere, and creditors who would gladly see you fed to the coyotes—why, then, my friend, you will understand exactly how Ezekiel "Zeke" Thompson felt on that memorable evening when our story begins. Rawlins was not what you might call a promising place for a man of refined commercial aspirations. The Union Pacific Railroad had deposited it there some years previous, like a spittoon in a cathedral, and it had grown accordingly—saloons and boarding-houses and establishments of questionable virtue, all strung along the tracks like beads on a gambler's rosary. The wind blew constantly, carrying with it the red dust of the high plains and the occasional corpse of some unfortunate who had mistaken December in Wyoming for a sensible climate. Zeke Thompson sat in the dining room of the Inter-Ocean Hotel, which was a grand name for a two-story frame building that leaned slightly to the left, as if contemplating a permanent lie-down. He was thirty-two years old, though he looked forty-five, which is what happens when a man eats despair for breakfast and washes it down with coffee that tastes like it was brewed from railroad ties. His suit, once respectable, had seen better days—specifically, the days before he had tried to corner the silver market in Leadville and discovered that corners have a way of becoming traps when you are playing with other people's money. Before him on the table sat a letter, which he had read so many times that the paper had grown soft as flannel. It was from a lawyer in Chicago, a man named Henderson, who wrote with the cold precision of one who had never known what it was to sleep in a livery stable. The letter informed Zeke that his various creditors had grown tired of waiting for payment and had decided to sue him for everything he owned, which was nothing, plus everything he might ever own, which they calculated optimistically as a considerable sum. The total damages claimed amounted to forty-seven thousand dollars, a figure so large that Zeke could only regard it with the same numb fascination that a chicken regards the axe. "I am ruined," Zeke said aloud, though there was no one to hear him. The dining room was empty except for a fly that was making slow circles around the kerosene lamp, apparently having decided that suicide was preferable to another minute in Rawlins. He had come west three years ago with dreams of making his fortune—dreams as bright and shiny as a new Morgan dollar. He had tried mining, and discovered that the only thing harder than rock was finding paying ore. He had tried cattle, and discovered that cows had an inconvenient habit of dying in blizzards. He had tried land speculation, and discovered that land in Wyoming was approximately as valuable as land on the moon, and considerably harder to sell. Now, at the end of his rope, he had exactly enough money to buy a ticket back east, where he would be greeted by lawyers and process servers and, eventually, a cell in debtor's prison. "I am ruined," he said again, because it bore repeating. The door to the kitchen swung open, and Mrs. O'Malley appeared, carrying a plate of beef stew that looked like it had been made from the boots of deceased prospectors. She was a large woman, built on the architectural principles that had produced the Forth Bridge, with a face that suggested she had seen too much of human nature and found it wanting. "You gonna eat that, or just sit there communing with your miseries?" she asked. "I am considering which would be more nourishing," Zeke replied. Mrs. O'Malley snorted—a sound like a steam valve releasing pressure—and set the plate down with a clatter that suggested she had once worked as a blacksmith. "You're the third one this week," she said. "Men coming through here with their pockets turned inside out and their eyes full of broken dreams. The West eats 'em up and spits 'em out, and still they come. You'd think the newspapers would run a warning, but I suppose 'GO WEST AND LOSE YOUR SHIRT' don't sell as many tickets." "I had such plans," Zeke said, more to himself than to her. "I was going to be rich. I was going to have a house on Prairie Avenue, with electric lights and a telephone. I was going to eat off gold plates and have a butler who would say 'Very good, sir' when I asked for more champagne." "And now?" "Now I would settle for a plate that wasn't made of tin." Mrs. O'Malley regarded him with something that might have been pity, though it was hard to tell through the layers of worldly cynicism that encased her like armor. "There's an old fellow in the parlor," she said. "Came in this afternoon on the eastbound. He's got a fire going, and he don't seem to mind company. Might do you good to talk to someone who ain't trying to collect money from you." "What kind of old fellow?" "The kind that asks questions and don't give answers. The kind that looks at you like he can see clean through to your backbone. The kind, in short, that makes a body wonder if he's entirely natural." Zeke considered this. He had no particular desire for company, but the alternative was sitting alone with his thoughts, and his thoughts were poor company indeed. He pushed himself up from the table—his joints creaking like a wagon in need of grease—and made his way to the parlor. The room was small and dim, lit only by the fire that crackled in the stone fireplace. An old man sat in the rocking chair beside it, wrapped in a buffalo robe that had seen better decades. He was ancient—eighty at least, perhaps older—with a face like a dried apple and eyes that gleamed with an unsettling brightness in the firelight. His hair was white as new snow, and his beard fell to his chest like a waterfall of silver. "Come in, Mr. Thompson," the old man said, without turning around. "I've been expecting you." Zeke stopped in the doorway. "You know my name?" "I know many things. Sit down. The chair by the fire is warm." There was something in the old man's voice—a quality of certainty, of absolute authority—that made disobedience unthinkable. Zeke sat. "You are troubled," the old man said. It was not a question. "I am ruined." "So you said. And so you believe. But tell me, Mr. Thompson—what would you give to have your fortune? To be rich beyond the dreams of avarice? To stand at the pinnacle of American commerce, with the world at your feet and money flowing into your coffers like water into a millrace?" Zeke laughed—a bitter, broken sound. "I would give anything. Everything. What does a ruined man have to lose?" The old man smiled, and in that smile was something that made Zeke's blood run cold and hot simultaneously. "Would you give your youth? Your health? Your soul?" "My soul is already in hock to various creditors in three states. As for youth and health—look at me. I have neither." "Perhaps." The old man reached into the folds of his robe and produced something that made Zeke's eyes widen. It was a pillow—small, rectangular, covered in fabric that seemed to shift and shimmer in the firelight, now gold, now silver, now the deep purple of a twilight sky. "This," the old man said, "is the Pillow of Fortune. It was woven by hands that have not walked the earth in ten thousand years, from threads that were spun in dreams. Whoever rests his head upon it shall live a lifetime in a single night—shall taste the full sweetness and bitterness of mortal ambition, and wake to find that no time has passed." Zeke stared at the pillow. "You're mad." "Perhaps. Or perhaps I am the only sane man in a world gone mad for gold. You want wealth, Mr. Thompson? You want to know what it is to be a prince of commerce, a captain of industry, a man whose name is spoken in whispers on Wall Street? Then lay your head upon this pillow and sleep. But be warned—what you experience will be as real as any life, with all its joys and all its sorrows. And when you wake, you may find that the dream has taught you something you did not wish to learn." Zeke should have laughed. He should have risen from his chair and gone to his room and packed his bag and caught the morning train to Chicago, where he would face his creditors like a man. But the pillow seemed to glow with an inner light, and the old man's eyes held him like a snake holds a bird. "Who are you?" Zeke whispered. "I have many names. In China, they called me Lu Dongbin. In India, I was visited as a sage. In your country, I have walked among the mountains and the deserts, watching men chase gold across a continent that never asked for them. I am the dreamer who dreams the world, and the world that dreams the dreamer. And tonight, Mr. Thompson, I am offering you a gift that few men have ever received—the chance to live a life in full, and to learn from it what you will." The fire crackled. The wind moaned around the eaves of the hotel. And Zeke Thompson, who had nothing left to lose, reached out and took the pillow. It was warm to the touch—warm as living flesh—and it seemed to pulse with a rhythm like a heartbeat. Zeke lay down on the horsehair sofa that stood against the wall, placed the pillow beneath his head, and closed his eyes. "Sleep well," the old man said. "And remember—whatever happens, it is only a dream." But Zeke was already sinking into darkness, and the last thing he heard was the old man's voice, fading into distance: "Only a dream... only a dream..." CHAPTER II In Which Our Hero Dreams of Humble Beginnings and a Fortuitous Encounter Zeke opened his eyes. He was standing in a street—a street he recognized, though he had not seen it in years. It was Dearborn Street in Chicago, in the year 1865, and he was eighteen years old again, with a strong back and clear eyes and a future that stretched before him like an open road. He looked down at himself. His hands were young, uncalloused by failure. His clothes were shabby but whole—a clerk's suit, the uniform of a thousand ambitious young men who had come to the city to make their fortunes. In his pocket, he found seventeen dollars—the same seventeen dollars he had possessed in Rawlins, but now they seemed like a fortune. "I am dreaming," Zeke said aloud. "This is the old man's dream." But it did not feel like a dream. The air smelled of horse dung and coal smoke and the lake wind that swept through the streets. The buildings were solid brick and stone, not the shifting architecture of sleep. People pushed past him—men in tall hats, women in crinolines, newsboys shouting the latest from the war that had just ended—and they all seemed as real as anything he had ever known. He walked down Dearborn Street, marveling at the vitality of the city. Chicago in 1865 was a place of infinite possibility, a city that had risen from the ashes of the Great Fire and was growing so fast that you could almost hear it expanding, like bread in an oven. The streets were muddy, the wooden sidewalks treacherous, but everywhere there was energy, ambition, the sense that anything was possible if you were smart enough and ruthless enough and lucky enough. Zeke found himself standing before the offices of Marshall Field & Company, the great dry goods store that was already becoming a legend. Through the windows, he could see the counters piled high with fabrics and notions, the clerks moving among the customers with the smooth efficiency of a well-oiled machine. And standing on the steps, talking to a group of men in expensive suits, was Marshall Field himself—the Merchant Prince, the man who had built an empire from nothing. Zeke stared. In his real life, he had never met Field. He had seen him once, from a distance, at a political rally, but that was all. Now, impossibly, the great man was looking directly at him, and there was something in his eyes—a recognition, an appraisal—that made Zeke's heart beat faster. "You there," Field said. "Young man. Come here." Zeke approached, his legs moving of their own accord. "Yes, sir?" "I need a clerk. Someone who can keep accounts, who understands figures, who isn't afraid of hard work. You look intelligent. Can you write a fair hand?" "Yes, sir." "Can you keep your mouth shut and your eyes open?" "Yes, sir." "Can you start tomorrow at six o'clock in the morning and work until nine at night, six days a week, for twelve dollars a week?" Twelve dollars a week! In his real life, Zeke had started at eight. "Yes, sir," he said. "Then you're hired. Report to Mr. Leiter in the morning. And young man—don't disappoint me. I have no use for men who dream but don't deliver." And so Zeke's dream-life began. The years that followed were a blur of work and learning and careful calculation. He rose at five every morning, ate a hasty breakfast, and was at his desk by six. He learned the dry goods business from the ground up—learned how to buy, how to sell, how to read a customer's desires from the cut of his coat and the shine of his shoes. He watched Marshall Field with the devotion of a disciple, studying his methods, his principles, his ruthless dedication to customer satisfaction. "Give the lady what she wants," Field would say, and Zeke took the words as his creed. By the age of twenty-five, he was a department manager, earning fifty dollars a week and saving half of it. By thirty, he was a junior partner in a new venture—a wholesale grocery business that supplied the growing city with everything from flour to fancy goods. And by thirty-five, he had sold his share of the grocery business for fifty thousand dollars and was ready to make his real move. The railroads. That was where the future lay. The great steel ribbons that were binding the continent together, that were making possible the movement of goods and people on a scale never before imagined. Zeke invested his fifty thousand in railroad bonds, then in railroad stocks, then—when he saw which way the wind was blowing—in the construction of new lines that would open up the West to settlement and commerce. It was 1880, and America was drunk on progress. The telephone had been invented, the electric light was spreading through the cities, and everywhere men were making fortunes that would have seemed impossible a generation before. Zeke rode this wave with the skill of a born speculator, buying when others sold, selling when others bought, always staying one step ahead of the crowd. By 1883, he was worth half a million dollars. By 1885, two million. And by 1887—the year he had fallen asleep in Rawlins—he was one of the wealthiest men in Chicago, with a mansion on Prairie Avenue, a private railroad car, and a seat on the board of three major corporations. His house was everything he had dreamed of. It had twenty rooms, each more opulent than the last. The dining room could seat forty guests at a single table. The ballroom had a ceiling painted with scenes from Greek mythology, and a chandelier that weighed three tons and had cost more than Zeke's father had earned in his entire life. There were electric lights in every room, a telephone that connected him to his offices downtown, and a staff of servants who jumped to do his bidding before he even spoke. His wife was beautiful—Eleanor Van Dusen, daughter of an old New York family, with golden hair and blue eyes and a laugh like silver bells. She had married him despite her family's objections, because she saw in him something that the old money could not see—the energy of the new America, the drive and ambition that were building a new world on the ashes of the old. They had two children—a son, Marshall, named for the great merchant who had given Zeke his start, and a daughter, Caroline, who had her mother's beauty and her father's determination. They were the perfect family, the ideal of Gilded Age success, and Zeke loved them with a fierceness that surprised even himself. But it was not enough. The problem with wealth, Zeke discovered, was that it was never enough. When you had a million, you wanted two. When you had two, you wanted five. When you had five, you wanted ten, and then twenty, and then fifty, and then—why not?—a hundred million, a figure so vast that it dwarfed the fortunes of kings and emperors. He was not alone in this madness. All around him, men were caught in the same frenzy—Jay Gould and Jim Fisk and the other railroad barons, Andrew Carnegie with his steel mills, John D. Rockefeller with his oil monopoly, J.P. Morgan with his banking empire. They were the new aristocracy, the princes of the Gilded Age, and they competed with each other for wealth and power with a ruthlessness that would have made the Borgias blush. Zeke played their game and played it well. He formed alliances and broke them, made deals and betrayed them, crushed competitors and absorbed their businesses into his growing empire. He learned the arts of the pool and the corner, the bear raid and the bull campaign. He bribed legislators and bought judges, hired Pinkerton detectives to break strikes and newspaper editors to sing his praises. And always, always, he wanted more. CHAPTER III In Which Our Hero Reaches the Pinnacle and Discovers It Is a Precarious Place By 1890, Ezekiel Thompson was forty-three years old and worth twenty million dollars. He had his finger in every pie that mattered—railroads, steel, oil, banking, real estate. His name was spoken in hushed tones on Wall Street, where men told stories of his financial coups with the reverence that previous generations had reserved for the miracles of saints. He had built a new house, even grander than the first—a palace of limestone and marble on the lakefront, with a private beach and a yacht dock and a conservatory filled with exotic plants that required the constant attention of three gardeners. The house had a ballroom that could accommodate five hundred guests, a library with ten thousand volumes bound in leather and gold, and a master bedroom suite that was larger than the entire house where Zeke had grown up. He entertained constantly—dinners for fifty, balls for five hundred, weekends at his country estate that were written up in the society pages as the epitome of Gilded Age elegance. Senators and governors came to his table, European nobility sought his acquaintance, and the President of the United States had once spent the night in his guest room. And yet, in the small hours of the morning, when the guests had gone home and the servants were asleep, Zeke would walk through the empty rooms of his palace and feel a hollowness that no amount of money could fill. His wife had grown distant. Eleanor had never fully approved of the methods by which he built his fortune—the crushed competitors, the broken unions, the political manipulations that smelled of corruption even when they were technically legal. She spent more and more time at their country estate, leaving Zeke alone in the city with his business and his worries. His children were strangers to him. Marshall, now fifteen, was being educated in England, and Zeke saw him only at Christmas and during the summer holidays. The boy was polite and distant, more interested in horses and cricket than in the business empire that his father was building for him. Caroline, thirteen, was at a finishing school in Switzerland, learning to be a lady of fashion, and her letters to her father were filled with descriptions of parties and dresses and the doings of people Zeke had never met. He told himself that this was the price of success. That every great man had to make sacrifices, that the empire he was building would be his legacy, that his children would thank him when they inherited the fortune he had created. But in his heart, he knew that something was wrong—that he had traded something precious for his piles of gold, and that the trade had not been a fair one. The panic of 1893 changed everything. It began, as these things always do, with a whisper. A railroad company failed in Philadelphia. A bank closed in Kansas City. A trust company in New York found itself unable to meet its obligations. And then, like a fire in a dry forest, the panic spread—bank after bank, company after company, until the entire financial system of the country seemed on the verge of collapse. Zeke had seen it coming. He had known, in the way that men of his kind always know, that the boom could not last forever—that the wild speculation, the overbuilding, the pyramid schemes of credit and debt were bound to come crashing down eventually. But he had thought he could ride it out, that his position was strong enough to withstand any storm. He was wrong. The first blow came from his railroad holdings. The Northern Pacific, in which he had invested heavily, went into receivership, wiping out five million dollars of his fortune overnight. Then his steel company failed, unable to meet its debt payments when the banks called in their loans. Then his real estate investments turned sour, as property values collapsed and tenants defaulted on their rents. Within six months, Zeke had lost fifteen million dollars. Within a year, he was worth less than he had been in 1885, and the vultures were circling. His creditors, who had been happy to lend him money when times were good, now demanded payment with the eagerness of men who smelled blood. His competitors, who had envied and feared him, now moved in for the kill, buying up his assets at bankruptcy prices and laughing behind their hands at his downfall. He fought back with all the energy and cunning that had made him rich in the first place. He made deals, called in favors, used every trick he knew to keep his empire afloat. But the tide was against him, and one by one, his businesses failed, his properties were seized, his fortune evaporated like morning mist. The final blow came on a cold day in February 1894. Zeke was in his office on LaSalle Street, surrounded by lawyers and creditors and men who had once called him friend, when the news arrived. His last major holding—a bank that he had founded and nurtured and built into one of the strongest in the Midwest—had been declared insolvent and taken over by the government. There was nothing left. The empire was gone. Zeke walked out of that office a ruined man. He had a few thousand dollars in a personal account, some jewelry that he could sell, and the clothes on his back. Everything else—the houses, the yachts, the railroad cars, the art collections, the investments, the businesses—was gone, swallowed up by the panic and the creditors and the relentless logic of the market. He went to his house on Prairie Avenue, hoping to find some comfort in the familiar rooms, some solace in the presence of his family. But the house was empty. Eleanor had taken the children and gone to her parents in New York. She left a letter, brief and cold, informing him that she could not live with a failure, that she intended to file for divorce, and that she expected a generous settlement from whatever assets he might still possess. Zeke sat in the empty ballroom, surrounded by the ghosts of a thousand parties, and wept. CHAPTER IV In Which Our Hero Discovers the True Nature of His Friends and the Emptiness of His Life The months that followed were the darkest that Zeke had ever known. He moved into a cheap hotel, then into a boarding house, then—when even that became too expensive—into a room above a saloon, where the noise of the bar below kept him awake until the small hours of the morning. He tried to find work, but no one would hire him. His reputation was poison now—the great Ezekiel Thompson, the man who had once been worth twenty million dollars, was now a byword for failure and disgrace. The same newspapers that had sung his praises when he was rich now delighted in cataloguing his fall, in describing his reduced circumstances, in speculating about what had become of the Merchant Prince of Prairie Avenue. His friends—if they had ever been his friends—abandoned him. The men who had dined at his table, who had sought his advice, who had flattered and fawned and competed for his favor—now they crossed the street to avoid him, or looked through him as if he were invisible, or offered him "advice" that was thinly disguised gloating at his misfortune. Only one man remained loyal—a former clerk named Higgins, who had worked for Zeke in the early days of his grocery business and had risen to be a manager in one of his railroad companies. Higgins had lost his job when the company failed, but he had managed to save a little money, and he used it to help Zeke, bringing him food and clean clothes and the occasional dollar for necessities. "Why are you doing this?" Zeke asked him one day, as they sat in Zeke's miserable room above the saloon. "I can't pay you back. I have nothing." "You were good to me once," Higgins said simply. "When my wife was sick, you paid for her doctor. When my son wanted to go to college, you gave me a raise so I could afford the tuition. I haven't forgotten." Zeke stared at him. He had no memory of these kindnesses. They were small things, insignificant in the scale of his former wealth, lost in the blur of deals and schemes and the endless pursuit of more. And yet this man had remembered. This man, who had nothing himself, was giving what little he had to help the man who had once been his master. "I was a fool," Zeke said. "I thought that money was everything. I thought that the man with the most gold was the happiest. And now I have nothing, and I find that the only friend I have is a man I don't even remember being kind to." "You weren't a bad man, Mr. Thompson," Higgins said. "You were just... caught up in it all. The money, the power, the game. It happens to a lot of them. The ones who make it big, I mean. They forget what really matters." "And what really matters?" Higgins shrugged. "Family. Friends. Doing right by people. Sleeping sound at night, knowing you haven't cheated anyone. That kind of thing." Zeke thought of Eleanor, who had left him without a backward glance. Of his children, who were being raised by strangers in a foreign country. Of the thousands of men he had crushed in his climb to the top—the competitors bankrupted, the workers thrown out of their jobs, the small investors ruined by his financial manipulations. "I have none of those things," he said. "No," Higgins agreed. "But you could have. If you start over. If you learn from your mistakes." "Start over? I'm fifty years old. I'm broke. I have no skills except making money, and I've proven that I'm not very good at that." "You're still alive," Higgins said. "That's more than a lot of people can say, after what you've been through. And where there's life, there's hope." But Zeke had no hope. He had seen the truth of his life, and it was ugly. He had spent thirty years chasing a dream of wealth and power, and he had achieved it—and then lost it—and in the process, he had lost everything that really mattered. He was alone, friendless, destitute, and broken. He began to drink. It started with a glass of whiskey to help him sleep, to quiet the voices in his head that whispered of his failures. Then it was two glasses, then three, then a bottle. He spent his days in the saloon below his room, drinking away the little money that Higgins gave him, sinking into a stupor that was the only escape from the misery of his thoughts. Higgins tried to stop him, but Zeke would not be stopped. He drove away the only friend he had left with curses and accusations, blaming Higgins for his own weakness, for his own inability to face the wreckage of his life. And then, one night in the winter of 1895, Zeke Thompson died. It was not a dramatic death. He did not fall from a great height, or die in a duel of honor, or expire in the arms of a weeping mistress. He simply drank too much bad whiskey, in too short a time, in too weakened a condition, and his heart gave out. They found him in his room above the saloon, cold and stiff, with an empty bottle in his hand and a look of surprise on his face, as if death were the one thing he had not expected. He was buried in a pauper's grave, with no marker and no mourners. The newspapers noted his passing in brief paragraphs, remarking on the irony of the great speculator's end, and then forgot him. Within a year, his name was rarely spoken, and when it was, it was as a cautionary tale—a warning to young men who might be tempted to follow in his footsteps. And so ended the life of Ezekiel Thompson, as it had been lived in the dream. CHAPTER V In Which Our Hero Awakens to Find That Nothing Has Changed, and Everything Has Changed Zeke opened his eyes. He was lying on the horsehair sofa in the parlor of the Inter-Ocean Hotel in Rawlins, Wyoming. The fire still crackled in the fireplace, casting dancing shadows on the walls. The old man still sat in the rocking chair, wrapped in his buffalo robe, watching him with those unsettling eyes. "You have returned," the old man said. Zeke sat up, his heart pounding. He looked down at himself—his young hands, his shabby suit, his body that was thirty-two years old again, not the broken fifty-year-old wreck that had died in a Chicago slum. "How long...?" "Time has not moved," the old man said. "You have lived a lifetime in the space of a breath. The world outside this room is exactly as it was when you closed your eyes." Zeke looked toward the kitchen. He could hear Mrs. O'Malley moving about, could smell the coffee that was brewing on the stove. The fly still circled the kerosene lamp, apparently having decided against suicide after all. "It was real," Zeke whispered. "Every moment of it. The success, the wealth, the fall, the death—it was all real." "As real as any life," the old man agreed. "That is the nature of the Pillow of Fortune. It does not show you fantasies, Mr. Thompson. It shows you what would be, if you had the chance to live again with all the knowledge and ambition that you possess. It shows you the path that you would take, the choices that you would make, the end that you would come to." Zeke buried his face in his hands. The memories were overwhelming—the joy of his first success, the pride of his growing empire, the love of his wife (or was it love? Had she ever loved him, or only his money?), the birth of his children, the thrill of the deal, the agony of the fall, the loneliness of his final years, the bitterness of his death. "I was a fool," he said. "A greedy, blind fool. I had everything, and I threw it away for more. I had a wife who loved me, and I drove her away with my ambition. I had children who needed me, and I abandoned them for my business. I had friends, and I used them and discarded them when they were no longer useful. And in the end, I had nothing." "Yes," the old man said. "That is the way of it, for most men who chase gold. They think that wealth will bring them happiness, and they discover too late that it brings only more hunger. The more they have, the more they want, and the more they want, the less they enjoy what they have. It is a disease, Mr. Thompson, and your country is sick with it." Zeke looked up. "The Gilded Age. That's what they call it, isn't it? The age of gold. But it's not gold—it's gilt. A thin layer of shine over a core of rot." "You begin to understand." "But what am I to do?" Zeke asked. "I am still ruined. I still have creditors waiting for me in Chicago. I still have no money, no prospects, no future. The dream has shown me what I would become if I succeeded—but I have failed even at that. I am nothing." The old man smiled—that same smile that had made Zeke's blood run cold and hot simultaneously. "You are not nothing, Mr. Thompson. You are a man who has lived a lifetime in an instant, who has learned lessons that take most men seventy years to learn. You have seen the end of the road that you were traveling, and you have discovered that it leads to a precipice. That knowledge is worth more than all the gold in the world." "But what use is knowledge, if I have no money?" "You have something better than money. You have time. You are thirty-two years old, with your whole life before you. You have health, intelligence, and—now—wisdom. You can start again, not as a greedy speculator chasing the illusion of wealth, but as a man who understands what really matters." Zeke thought of Higgins, the loyal clerk who had been his only friend in his darkest hour. He thought of the kindnesses he had forgotten, the small decencies that had meant so much to someone else. He thought of Eleanor, and the children he had never really known, and the life he might have had if he had valued love more than money. "I could go back to Chicago," he said slowly. "I could face my creditors. I could make a settlement, pay what I can, start over with a clean conscience." "You could." "I could find work—not as a speculator, but as something honest. A clerk, a manager, a man who earns his living by doing useful work." "You could." "I could write to Eleanor—the real Eleanor, not the dream one. I could tell her that I was wrong, that I valued money over love, that I am sorry." "You could." "And maybe—just maybe—I could be happy. Not rich, but happy. Content with enough, instead of always wanting more." The old man nodded. "That is the lesson of the Pillow of Fortune, Mr. Thompson. Not that wealth is evil, but that the pursuit of wealth for its own sake is a kind of madness. The man who has enough and is satisfied with it is richer than the man who has millions and still wants more." He rose from his chair, and Zeke saw that he was taller than he had seemed, and older, and somehow more real than anything else in the room. "I must go now. The night is passing, and I have other errands." "Wait," Zeke said. "Who are you, really? Why did you show me this? What do you want from me?" The old man paused at the door. "I want nothing from you, Mr. Thompson. I am a traveler, a witness, a recorder of human folly and human wisdom. I have shown you what I have shown a thousand men before you, and what I will show a thousand men after. Some learn from it, and some do not. The choice is always theirs." "But the pillow—" "Keep it. Or throw it away. It matters not to me. It will not work again for you—you have had your dream, and you will not have another. But perhaps, someday, you will meet a young man with ambition burning in his heart and emptiness in his soul, and you will pass the pillow to him, and the lesson will continue." And with that, he was gone. Zeke sat alone in the parlor, the Pillow of Fortune in his lap. It was just a pillow now—soft, warm, but no longer magical. The shimmer was gone from its fabric, and it looked like nothing more than a well-made cushion that might have come from any department store. He sat for a long time, thinking about all that he had seen and learned. And then, slowly, he rose and walked to the kitchen. Mrs. O'Malley was standing at the stove, stirring a pot of coffee. She looked up as he entered, and her eyebrows rose. "You look different," she said. "Like you've seen a ghost, or had a revelation, or both." "Both," Zeke agreed. "Mrs. O'Malley, is that coffee ready?" "Just about. Why?" "Because I have a long journey ahead of me, and I need to be awake for it. I'm going back to Chicago." "Chicago?" She snorted. "Ain't that where your creditors are waiting?" "Yes. And I'm going to face them. I'm going to make things right, as best I can. And then I'm going to start over—not as a speculator, not as a man chasing gold, but as a man who has learned what really matters." Mrs. O'Malley studied him for a long moment, and then something like respect appeared in her eyes. "Well, I'll be damned," she said. "You actually mean it, don't you?" "I do." She poured him a cup of coffee and handed it to him. "Drink up, then. And good luck to you. You're gonna need it." Zeke took the cup and sipped. The coffee was terrible—bitter, over-brewed, with an aftertaste of coal oil. But it was real, and it was here, and it was now. And that was enough. He thought of the dream—the mansion on Prairie Avenue, the yacht, the railroad car, the millions that had come and gone. He thought of the real life that awaited him—modest, uncertain, but honest. And he knew, with a certainty that went deeper than any dream, that he had been given a gift that no amount of money could buy. The chance to begin again. EPILOGUE Being an Account of What Became of Ezekiel Thompson, and the Lesson He Learned I am writing this account in the year 1910, in a small house on the South Side of Chicago, where I have lived for the past fifteen years with my wife and our three children. Yes, my wife. Eleanor did not leave me, in the end. When I returned to Chicago in that winter of 1887, I went to her and told her everything—the dream, the lesson, the resolution to change. She did not believe me, of course. Who would believe such a tale? But she saw that I was different, that something had happened to me in that Wyoming boarding-house that had stripped away the greed and ambition that had nearly destroyed our marriage. We made a settlement with my creditors—paid them thirty cents on the dollar, which was more than they expected and less than they wanted, but enough to satisfy honor. I found work as a clerk in a hardware store, at twelve dollars a week, and we lived in three rooms above a grocery. It was a far cry from the mansion on Prairie Avenue, but we were happy. Gradually, I worked my way up—manager of the store, then partner, then owner of a small chain of hardware stores that served the working people of Chicago. By 1900, I was worth fifty thousand dollars—not the millions I had dreamed of in my youth, but enough to be comfortable. By 1905, I had sold the business and retired, to spend my time with my family and to write these memoirs. I have never forgotten the old man, or the Pillow of Fortune. I kept the pillow for many years, carrying it with me from place to place, waiting for the moment when I would meet a young man who needed its lesson. But the moment never came, or perhaps I was not wise enough to recognize it when it did. In the end, I gave the pillow to the Chicago Historical Society, with instructions that it be kept in their collection but never displayed. I told them it was a Native American artifact of great spiritual significance, which was true in its way. They accepted it with the solemnity that curators reserve for objects of dubious provenance, and there it remains to this day, in a box in their basement, waiting for the next dreamer. As for me, I am an old man now—fifty-five years old, which seems ancient to the young but feels like no time at all to me. I have lived the life that the dream showed me I should live—modest, honest, devoted to family and friends rather than to the pursuit of wealth. I have not been rich, but I have been content. I have not been famous, but I have been loved. And when I die, I will die in my own bed, surrounded by the people who matter to me, not alone in a room above a saloon with an empty bottle in my hand. Is that not worth more than all the gold in the world? I think it is. And so, young reader—if you are young, and ambitious, and burning with the desire to be rich and famous and powerful—I say to you: be careful what you wish for. The gold you chase may turn to dust in your hands. The empire you build may crumble to nothing. The friends you make may abandon you when you need them most. But the love of a good woman, the laughter of children, the respect of honest men—these things endure. These things matter. These things are the true wealth, the only wealth that counts. I learned this lesson in a dream, in a boarding-house in Rawlins, Wyoming, while the coffee brewed on the stove and the wind howled outside. It took me a lifetime to learn it—thirty years of ambition and greed, followed by a dream-lifetime of rise and fall and death. But you, reader, have learned it in an afternoon. The lesson is free, though it cost me everything I had. Use it well. THE END