Hatteras and Walker had been schoolfellows, though never classmates. Hatteras indeed was the head of the school and prophecy vaguely sketched out for him a brilliant career in some service of importance. The definite law, however, that the sins of the fathers shall be visited upon the children overbore this prophecy. Hatteras, the father, disorganized his son's future by dropping unexpectedly through one of the trapways of speculation into the Bankruptcy Court beneath, just two months before Hatteras, the son, was to have gone up to Oxford. The lad was therefore compelled to start life in a stony world with a stock-in-trade which consisted of a schoolboy's command of the classics, a real inborn gift of tongues and the friendship of James Walker.
The last item proved of the most immediate value. For Walker, whose father was the junior partner in a firm of West African merchants, obtained for Hatteras an employment as the bookkeeper at a branch factory in the Bight of Benin.
Thus the friends parted. Hatteras went out to West Africa alone, and met with a strange welcome on the day when he landed.

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