“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 “hole
up in them hills,” were real experiences to the young man. The simple,
natural, human quality of these strangers appealed to him. “It must be
the west,” he generalized easily. “I suppose Krutzmacht is the same
sort,—large-hearted, simple, a good gambler.” But the man who had signed
his name between convulsions,—H. KRUTZMACHT,—didn’t seem to fit the same
genial frame. He was of sterner stuff. “Anyway he’s given me one fine
time and I’ll do what I can for him out there!” It was useless to
speculate further as to what awaited him in San Francisco. It might be
that court proceedings having already begun, the affair would be taken
out of his hands completely. He might find a telegram from Krutzmacht
countermanding his orders.
At last he dropped to sleep, buoyant and eager for that unknown future
that lay before him, while the train having surmounted the last mountain
barrier wound slowly down into the green, fruit-covered valleys of
California.