THE GOLD OF OPHIR
BY D. HOWARD GWINN.
[Illustration]
F. TENNYSON NEELY,
PUBLISHER,
LONDON. NEW YORK.
Copyright, 1898,
by
F. TENNYSON NEELY
in
United States
and
Great Britain.
All Rights Reserved.
CONTENTS.
PAGE
CHAPTER I.
Salaam 5
CHAPTER II.
Leadville 14
CHAPTER III.
A Brace of Mining Experts 33
CHAPTER IV.
I Take a Partner 60
CHAPTER V.
Flying from the Piutes 100
CHAPTER VI.
Castle Safety 118
CHAPTER VII.
Shooting the Rapids 134
CHAPTER VIII.
In Stone 160
CHAPTER IX.
Gold 173
CHAPTER X.
The Lost Tribes 185
CHAPTER XI.
Bricks Without Straw 201
CHAPTER XII.
Story of the Tablets 213
CHAPTER XIII.
Temple of the Sun 227
CHAPTER XIV.
The Chariots of Israel and the Horsemen Thereof 245
CHAPTER XV.
Children of the Sun 266
CHAPTER XVI.
Farewell to Ophir 287
CHAPTER XVII.
Thornless Roses 313
THE GOLD OF OPHIR.
CHAPTER I.
SALAAM.
Have you, average American reader, ever paused in the midst of your
journey by the Rapid Transit Line through the jostling crowd of
humanity to the somber terminus of Life, paused long enough to consider
what startling vicissitudes attend some brief human experiences? Do you
realize that men now living remember Chicago as a hamlet of a dozen
shops and dwellings located, or more properly sunken, in quagmire? Are
you aware that men who are still pursuing the phantom Hope, by active
efforts in practical everyday occupations, remember it many years
before Long John Wentworth was dreamed of, or Phil Armour had seen the
light of an Illinois day?
Yet such is the case, and though I, Thomas Hardman, Jr., can lay claim
to no such venerable years in my own right, some strange and not
altogether untoward circumstances in my life have brought about these
reflections in my mind with startling force.
I am a native of Chicago, and my school life from the time that I
entered the primary department of the public school until I finished
the curriculum prescribed by the University of Chicago, was all
encompassed by a matter of a few blocks of the city, including my home,
which was with my paternal uncle. Fortune I had none; but educational
privileges second to none. My observation has taught me that such
advantages, coupled with the knowledge that these advantages and the
resulting mental and moral stamina are to constitute the sole equipment
for the struggle in the world, are in themselves an independent fortune
to any young man deserving of success.
It is true that the atmosphere of school life is apt to develop the
ideal faculties unduly, and has a tendency to exalt our ideas of life
and exaggerate our own importance in the world, and induce in the
young and imaginative student that state of mind denominated “walking
on air.” But if, when the valedictorian has made his bow, thrilled
the hearts of his fond friends and relatives by his eloquence, been
the recipient of flowers and compliments to his heart’s content, and
as the finished product of a great and grand institution, succeeds
in alighting from his airy perch on _terra firma_, plain and simple,
without breaking his neck, there is yet hope for him that he is made
of the tough genuine fiber of the type of manhood known in polite
language as the successful variety.
So having in my own person proven the correctness of these theories,
and run the educational gauntlet and found myself still alive, I
determined to make the best of it, though I found myself growing
cynical in my views of life and almost ready at times to give up in
despair.
While in the confessional I may as well make a clean breast of
it, and own that to add to my despair and intensify my melancholy
reflections on the unequal gifts of life, I was madly in love. Yes,
even in the practical city of the young West, there was at least one
young man completely given over to the pleasing yet painful, the
poetical yet contradictory and deliciously bitter-sweet sense of
yearning and pining, and hoping and fearing, that marks the condition
of the hopelessly distraught lover. Not that the adored one did not
reciprocate the feelings of her inamorata, for she had long since
yielded her affections to my soft persuasions, and we had framed our
own philosophy of life into which love was to enter so largely as to
exclude all disagreeable minor themes; and as we were schoolmates
and classmates, I knew beyond a peradventure that in all social and
intellectual acquirements as well as gifts, I was her peer. Beyond this
no troublesome questions of inequality had intruded, believing as we
did with Charles Dickens that “there is no disparity in marriage so
great as unsuitableness in thought and feeling.” Our interests from
childhood had been on the same horizon; the same form of religious
belief was ours. The same social status had been thus far given no hint
of the chasm that was to open between us. What was the Griffin that
stood in our path to happiness? Ah! the only disparity in our lives was
the disparity in the number of paltry dollars we possessed.
Lena Upton was the child of wealthy parents, while I was the almost
penniless ward of an indulgent but impecunious uncle. Lena’s ancestors
had settled upon a section of swamp land adjoining a like tract owned
by my ancestors. Her family acres were not one whit less productive of
frog-spawn, mosquitoes, and miasma than were those of my progenitors.
The city was as densely populous on the tract that should have been my
patrimony as on that which made Lena’s father a multi-millionaire. But
strange to say, all this divergence of results was brought about by a
trifling superiority of liver on the part of Lena’s grandfather over
that of mine, or perhaps the whiskey and quinine that he employed as a
remedial agent was a _bona fide_ brand, while my worthy grandsire was
a victim of the spurious article. Be that as it may, my grandfather
died of malarial fever at a critical time in the history of his
possessions and a slight flaw in the title was examined with a lens of
high magnifying power, by the sharks of the law, till it appeared as a
blotch on the land large enough to obscure and alienate it.
Great was my wrath and towering my impotent rage when I learned that
this trifling circumstance was regarded by Lena’s parents as an
impassable barrier between us. And while a schoolboy and schoolgirl
friendship between us was smiled upon as quite the correct thing,
the knowledge that an engagement existed between Lena and myself was
the signal for an explosion of wrath against me, and, from being an
innocent, agreeable, and suitable companion for Lena Upton, I became
at a bound, in the sight of her parents, a dangerous charmer and
cold-blooded fortune hunter, who would contaminate Lena’s morals by my
presence, and if allowed to carry out my plotting programme, would make
complete shipwreck of her happiness.
This was what I gathered to be the sum and substance of the politely
worded interview with which Mr. Upton favored me. In my ignorance of
worldly wisdom, I made my plea of an unsullied life, undying lofty
Platonic affection for Lena, and ventured to quote from Scripture that
a good name was rather to be chosen than great riches.
But to my surprise, for Mr. Upton is a very prominent worker in the
---- Street Baptist church, he ignored all these arguments, as not
applying to this case in the least, though certainly very true in a
general sense.
I was sanguine that with my splendid health, and with such an
all-impelling motive, I could, in a few years, achieve wealth, and as
for position socially, was not mine already on an equal footing with
hers?
He shook his head incredulously at my first proposition, and as to the
second, he said, “You think so now, my boy, but you will speedily find
your mistake.”
I was forced to own that the tropical warmth of my pleadings was
powerless against his glacial coldness, and I soon found myself reduced
to the dire extremity of asking leave to see Lena for five minutes,
to say good-by, which was grudgingly granted, on my promising on my
sacred honor not to make any effort to communicate in any way with her
clandestinely. Lena’s distress at parting--strange contradiction--was
all that I could desire. She agreed that we must keep sacredly the
promise I had made, not to see her again, but with a woman’s unerring
instinct in such matters, fixed upon the only possible source of
comfort in the situation, by assuring me that she could and would
wait. For she said, “I am sure something will yet happen to bring us
back to each other.”
So with all the tenderness of an ardent nature toward Lena, and all the
bitterness, I fear, of a somewhat resentful one toward her parents, I
was forced to a parting that was fully understood and believed by her
parents to be a final one, but brightened by her loving assurance that
time could not change her feelings toward me.
I resolved then and there that I would rest neither day nor night till
I had secured a situation in the city where I might begin to climb,
even if it were from the lowest round. I naturally turned first to
those with whom I had been on terms of friendship socially, among the
business men of my acquaintance. I found to my disgust that there
were no vacancies here and I imagined that I was dismissed a trifle
superciliously by the men whom I had called friends.
I haunted the streets and business houses like a ghost and I soon came
to resemble one as compared to my former self. I was compelled to plead
guilty to the charge of inexperience, which seemed to be considered an
unpardonable one in the eyes of many, while I was politely dismissed to
wander on again with a somewhat dazed and perplexed inner questioning
as to how I was to gain experience without opportunity. I began to envy
the very bootblacks who had a settled calling and with every boot they
polished were gaining what lacked. I, too, was gaining experience,
but it was of that painful kind that turns to wormwood the spirit of
benevolence that sweetens human intercourse. I saw young men, whom I
knew to have enjoyed not a tithe of the advantages which I had not only
enjoyed but improved, holding positions of trust and profit because
they had a friend at court; and others who had enjoyed equal advantages
with me, but had despised them and had merely drifted through the
prescribed course, studying to evade rather than master the task of
to-day, heedless and ambitionless of to-morrow, succeeding without an
effort on their part to a partnership in a lucrative business with
their fathers or other near relatives.
All these things, with my failure to find work, preyed as a moral
gangrene on my happiness, I found myself harboring wild thoughts of
ending it all by a plunge in the waters of the harbor.
My uncle, ever kindly solicitous for my welfare, at last seeing my
desperate state of mind and knowing my straightened circumstances
better than I, at last came to my rescue with a suggestion which was
the means of changing the whole drift of my life into new channels.
Knowing my partiality for chemistry, mineralogy, and kindred studies,
he suggested a trip to Leadville, then beginning to create quite a
sensation by its great mineral wealth, with a view of utilizing my
technical knowledge of minerals primarily in investigating the worth of
that one of the various groups of mines known as The Little Pittsburg
in which my uncle and I each owned some shares, which we had bought for
a song of a disgusted eastern gold seeker on his way home from Colorado
a year or two before. Afterward, he said, “You may be able to qualify
yourself by practical experience as a mining expert and do a thriving
business.”
I was in just the reckless frame of mind to act on such a suggestion,
and adding his slender resources to mine, my uncle gave me a hearty
handshake and “God bless you, my boy,” and saw me on board a train with
a ticket for Leadville.