From this point the talk drifted on erratically as the train rushed towards the Sierras. The agreeable young man who read Paradise Lost and was under bonds to justice seemed to have an extensive acquaintance in common with the grizzled miner. They discussed some Scotchman who had been mining but now owned an oil well in the “Midway field” that was reputed to be bringing in five thousand dollars a day. Another of their friends—an Englishman—had a silver “proposition” in Mexico. There was also Jimmie Birt who owned a string of horses and had sunk a fortune in a mine in British Columbia, but Jimmie, it seemed, was making good in Oregon timber land. So it went with one adventurer after another, roaming this side of the continent, now penniless, to-morrow with millions, restlessly darting from subarctic Alaska to subtropical Mexico along the coast or the mountain spine of the continent. They sought gold and silver and copper, oil and wood and cattle, water-power, wheat, and wine—it made little odds what. Everything was a “big proposition” in which to make or lose. Brainard drank in the varied biography of this company of adventurers, his brain fired with the excitements of their risks. Krutzmacht, it seemed to him, must have been such a one as these. He was on the point of asking the old miner, who was the principal talker, if he had ever heard of Krutzmacht, when his ears caught the words:
“I see by to-day’s San Francisco paper that a receivership has been asked for the Shasta companies. That means they’ve got Krutzmacht, don’t it?”
“I expect so—he’s been on the edge some time from what I hear,” the younger man replied.
“So they got him. … I thought Herb would make good—he was a nervy Dutchman, if there ever was one! But he couldn’t go up against that crowd.”
“When he began building his road through the mountains to the Bay, the S. P. crowd went for him and shut off his credit. You’ve got to get permission to do some things in California.”
“I’m told he’d built up a big property.”
“That’s right—if he’d been able to hold on, there would have been millions, what with the power company, the timber, the railroad, and the land. That’s why the S. P. people wanted it! They waited, and when the panic came on, they began squeezing him. I saw him in New York a few days ago. I suppose he was trying to get money from some of those big Jew bankers where he’d got it before. But it isn’t the right time to pass the hat in Wall Street just now.”
The talk ran on desultorily about “the S. P. crowd,” who it seemed were the financial dictators of the Pacific Coast and “the nerve of the Dutchman who went up against that bunch.” Brainard listened closely to every word, but refrained from asking questions for fear of betraying an undue interest in Krutzmacht. As far as he could make out, with his inexperience in business affairs, Krutzmacht’s companies were valuable and solvent, but he himself was embarrassed, as many men of large enterprises were at this time, and his enemies had taken this opportune moment to get possession of his properties, using for that purpose the courts of which they seemed to have control as they had of the legislature and the governor.
“It’s a shame,” the younger stranger remarked frankly; “I expect they’ll put him through the mill and take every dollar he owns.”
“They’ll eat the hide off him all right!”
“Well, well,” the miner sighed in conclusion. “So Herb’s lost out! He’s a nervy one, though, obstinate as a mule. Wouldn’t surprise me if he crawled through somehow. I remember him years ago when he had a mine down in Arizona, a big low-grade copper proposition. That was in nineteen four, no—three. It was another of those big schemes, too big for any one man—a railroad and a smelter besides the mine. He claimed there was a fortune in it—and I guess it was so—only he was forced to shut down, and the next I heard of him he was out here on the Coast in this Shasta proposition.”
And that was all they had to say about Krutzmacht.
VI
“Do you know who that man is?” Brainard asked the old miner as the gentleman under bonds to return to California strolled out of the smoking room.
“Why, that’s Eddie Hollinger.”
“And who is Mr. Hollinger?”
“Say, young feller, don’t you ever read the papers where you live? Why, he’s the boss of the prize ring business here on the Coast—the ‘fight trust,’ as they call it. Made lots of money. Mighty fine feller Ed is, too. He’s having his troubles these days the same as the rest of us. They’re trying him for bribery, you know.”
After he had delivered himself of an impassioned defense of the “business men who were being hounded by a lot of hypocrites,” Brainard led him back to Krutzmacht, or as the miner preferred to call him, “that nervy Dutchman.” But beyond elaborating the story of his own personal encounter with the German a number of years before somewhere in Arizona, the miner could add little to what had already been told. The German was a daring and adventurous man, who had been “known on the Coast” for thirty years or more—always involved in some large financial venture in which he had been backed by capital from his native land. “But it’s up and down with all of us,” he sighed in conclusion and drifted on to tell his own story. He talked with the volubility and hopefulness of youth. When he said that he hadn’t seen a white man in six months except the dozen “dagoes” working his claim, his volubility seemed to Brainard excusable. It was less easy to explain his hopeful mood, for it appeared that he had knocked about the mountain states for the better part of a lifetime with scarcely more to show for his efforts than what was contained in his lean bag. But the roll of blue prints of his claim, with the little bag of specimen ore, was in his eyes a sure guarantee of fortune.
“You’d oughter see my mine—the Rosy Lee I call it because that was my wife’s name. It’s a winner sure! I’m expecting they’ll break into the vein every blast. May get a wire in Frisco that they’re in, and then you bet I’ll go whooping back to pick up the dollars! The Union, next door to me, so to speak, got some ore that ran forty thousand to the ton—they’ve taken out four millions already.”
He rambled on about “shoots,” “winzes,” “stopes,” “faults,” and geological formation until he had thoroughly fired the young man’s imagination with the fascinating lure of the search for “metal.” They examined the specimens in the old miner’s bag and talked far into the night while the train panted up the steep grades and the moonlight lay white on the snowdrifts of the mountains outside.
“Come back with me, young feller,” the miner said in his simple, expansive manner, “and I’ll show you some life you’ve never seen! … It’s kind of lonesome up there now the old woman’s gone. … You’ll make money.”
“I’d like to,” Brainard responded warmly. “Nothing better! Perhaps I will some day, but I can’t this trip.”
“Come soon,” the old fellow urged, “or you’ll find me at the Waldorf in your own town.”
Brainard lay awake in his berth long afterwards, listening to the laboring locomotives as they pulled the heavy train over the mountains, rushed through the snowsheds, and emerged occasionally to give glimpses of steep, snowy hillsides. The rarefied air of the lofty altitude had set his pulses humming. So much it seemed had happened to him already since he stepped aboard the train in Jersey City that he could hardly realize himself. The “boss of the fight trust” and the cheerful miner who had “lost the old woman six months back” and still had faith after a lifetime of disappointments that he would dig a fortune from that