The evidence points to the conclusion that the story some of the oldest settlers told about this district was really so. They say that forty and fifty and maybe seventy-five years ago, the quarter-section where the park was laid out was a green little glade, with a real, natural lake in the center. Later the lake was drained to raise corn, and the fish therein--many of them such noble fish as perch and bass--all died in the sun-baked mud. The pool that had gathered yearly was just the lake trying, like a spent prize fighter, to come back. And it is rather singular that buildings have been torn down and money has been spent to restore the little glade to its original charm; and now construction has been started to build an artificial lake in the center. One would be inclined to wonder why things weren't kept the way they were in the first place. But that is the way of cities.
Some day, when the city becomes more prosperous, a pair of swans and a herd of deer are going to be introduced, to restore some of the natural wild life of the park. But in the summer of 1919, a few small birds and possibly half a dozen pairs of squirrels were the extent and limit of the wild creatures. And at the moment this story opens, one of these squirrels was perched on a wide-spreading limb over-arching a gravel path that slanted through the sunlit park. The squirrel was hungry. He wished that some one would come along with a nut.
There was a bench beneath the tree. If there had not been, the life of Dan Failing would have been entirely different. In fact, as the events will show, there wouldn't have been any life worth talking about at all. If the squirrel had been on any other tree, if he hadn't been hungry, if any one of a dozen other things hadn't been as they were, Dan Failing would have never gone back to the land of his people. The little bushy-tailed fellow on the tree limb was the squirrel of Destiny!
Dan Failing stepped out of the elevator and was at once absorbed in the crowd that ever surged up and down Broad Street. Where the crowd came from, or what it was doing, or where it was going was one of the mysteries of Gitcheapolis. It appealed to a person rather as does a river: eternal, infinite, having no control over its direction or movement, but only subject to vast, underlying natural laws. In this case, the laws were neither gravity nor cohesion, but rather unnamed laws that go clear back to the struggle for existence and self-preservation. Once in the crowd, Failing surrendered up all individuality. He was just one of the ordinary drops of water, not an interesting, elaborate, physical and chemical combination to be studied on the slide of a microscope. No one glanced at him in particular. He was enough like the other drops of water not to attract attention. He wore fairly passable clothes, neither rich nor shabby. He was a tall man, but gave no impression of strength because of the exceeding spareness of his frame. As long as he remained in the crowd, he wasn't important enough to be studied. But soon he turned off, through the park, and straightway found himself alone.