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[Illustration: "_THE FAIR AND SOMETIMES UNCERTAIN DAUGHTER OF THE HOUSE
OF MILBREY_." (See page 182.)]
THE SPENDERS
A TALE OF THE THIRD GENERATION
BY
HARRY LEON WILSON
_Illustrated by_ O'NEILL LATHAM
1902
To L. L. J.
FOREWORD
The wanderers of earth turned to her--outcast of the older lands--
With a promise and hope in their pleading, and she reached them pitying
hands;
And she cried to the Old-World cities that drowse by the Eastern main:
"Send me your weary, house-worn broods and I'll send you Men again!
Lo, here in my wind-swept reaches, by my marshalled peaks of snow,
Is room for a larger reaping than your o'ertilled fields can grow.
Seed of the Main Seed springing to stature and strength in my sun,
Free with a limitless freedom no battles of men have won,"
For men, like the grain of the corn fields, grow small in the huddled
crowd,
And weak for the breath of spaces where a soul may speak aloud;
For hills, like stairways to heaven, shaming the level track,
And sick with the clang of pavements and the marts of the trafficking
pack.
Greatness is born of greatness, and breadth of a breadth profound;
The old Antaean fable of strength renewed from the ground
Was a human truth for the ages; since the hour of the Edenbirth
That man among men was strongest who stood with his feet on the earth!
SHARLOT MABRIDTH HALL.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER
I. The Second Generation Is Removed
II. How the First Generation Once Righted Itself
III. Billy Brue Finds His Man
IV. The West Against the East
V. Over the Hills
VI. A Meeting and a Clashing
VII. The Rapid-fire Lorgnon Is Spiked
VIII. Up Skiplap Canyon
IX. Three Letters, Private and Confidential
X. The Price of Averting a Scandal
XI. How Uncle Peter Bines Once Cut Loose
XII. Plans for the Journey East
XIII. The Argonauts Return to the Rising Sun
XIV. Mr. Higbee Communicates Some Valuable Information
XV. Some Light With a Few Side-lights
XVI. With the Barbaric Hosts
XVII. The Patricians Entertain
XVIII. The Course of True Love at a House Party
XIX. An Afternoon Stroll and an Evening Catastrophe
XX. Doctor Von Herslich Expounds the Hightower Hotel and Certain Allied
Phenomena
XXI. The Diversions of a Young Multi-millionaire
XXII. The Distressing Adventure of Mrs. Bines
XXIII. The Summer Campaign Is Planned
XXIV. The Sight of a New Beauty, and Some Advice from Higbee
XXV. Horace Milbrey Upholds the Dignity of His House
XXVI. A Hot Day in New York, with News of an Interesting Marriage
XXVII. A Sensational Turn in the Milbrey Fortunes
XXVIII. Uncle Peter Bines Comes to Town With His Man
XXIX. Uncle Peter Bines Threatens to Raise Something
XXX. Uncle Peter Inspires His Grandson to Worthy Ambitions
XXXI. Concerning Consolidated Copper and Peter Bines as Matchmakers
XXXII. Devotion to Business and a Chance Meeting
XXXIII. The Amateur Napoleon of Wall Street
XXXIV. How the Chinook Came to Wall Street
XXXV. The News Broken, Whereupon an Engagement is Broken
XXXVI. The God in the Machine
XXXVII. The Departure of Uncle Peter--And Some German Philosophy
XXXVIII. Some Phenomena Peculiar to Spring
XXXIX. An Unusual Plan of Action Is Matured
XL. Some Rude Behaviour, of Which Only a Western Man Could Be Guilty
XLI. The New Argonauts
ILLUSTRATIONS
"The fair and sometimes uncertain daughter of the house of Milbrey"
"'Well, Billy Brue,--what's doin'?'"
"The spell was broken"
"'Why, you'd be Lady Casselthorpe, with dukes and counts takin' off
their crowns to you'"
"'Remember that saying of your pa's, "it takes all kinds of fools to
make a world"'"
"'Say it that way--" Miss Milbrey is engaged with Mr. Bines, and can't
see you"'"
THE SPENDERS
CHAPTER I.
The Second Generation is Removed
When Daniel J. Bines died of apoplexy in his private car at Kaslo
Junction no one knew just where to reach either his old father or his
young son with the news of his death. Somewhere up the eastern slope of
the Sierras the old man would be leading, as he had long chosen to lead
each summer, the lonely life of a prospector. The young man, two years
out of Harvard, and but recently back from an extended European tour,
was at some point on the North Atlantic coast, beginning the season's
pursuit of happiness as he listed.
Only in a land so young that almost the present dwellers therein have
made it might we find individualities which so decisively failed to
blend. So little congruous was the family of Bines in root, branch, and
blossom, that it might, indeed, be taken to picture an epic of Western
life as the romancer would tell it. First of the line stands the figure
of Peter Bines, the pioneer, contemporary with the stirring days of
Fremont, of Kit Carson, of Harney, and Bridger; the fearless strivers
toward an ever-receding West, fascinating for its untried dangers as
for its fabled wealth,--the sturdy, grave men who fought and toiled and
hoped, and realised in varying measure, but who led in sober truth a
life such as the colours of no taleteller shall ever be high enough to
reproduce.
Next came Daniel J. Bines, a type of the builder and organiser who
followed the trail blazed by the earlier pioneer; the genius who,
finding the magic realm opened, forthwith became its exploiter to its
vast renown and his own large profit, coining its wealth of minerals,
lumber, cattle, and grain, and adventurously building the railroads
that must always be had to drain a new land of savagery.
Nor would there be wanting a third--a figure of this present day,
containing, in potency at least, the stanch qualities of his two rugged
forbears,--the venturesome spirit that set his restless grandsire to
roving westward, the power to group and coordinate, to "think three
moves ahead" which had made his father a man of affairs; and, further,
he had something modern of his own that neither of the others
possessed, and yet which came as the just fruit of the parent vine: a
disposition perhaps a bit less strenuous, turning back to the risen
rather than forward to the setting sun; a tendency to rest a little
from the toil and tumult; to cultivate some graces subtler than those
of adventure and commercialism; to make the most of what had been done
rather than strain to the doing of needless more; to live, in short,
like a philosopher and a gentleman who has more golden dollars a year
than either philosophers or gentlemen are wont to enjoy.
And now the central figure had gone suddenly at the age of fifty-two,
after the way of certain men who are quick, ardent, and generous in
their living. From his luxurious private car, lying on the side-track
at the dreary little station, Toler, private secretary to the
millionaire, had telegraphed to the headquarters of one important
railway company the death of its president, and to various mining,
milling, and lumbering companies the death of their president,
vice-president, or managing director as the case might be. For the
widow and only daughter word of the calamity had gone to a mountain
resort not far from the family home at Montana City.
There promised to be delay in reaching the other two. The son would
early read the news, Toler decided, unless perchance he were off at
sea, since the death of a figure like Bines would be told by every
daily newspaper in the country. He telegraphed, however, to the young
man's New York apartments and to a Newport address, on the chance of
finding him.
Locating old Peter Bines at this season of the year was a feat never
lightly to be undertaken, nor for any trivial end. It being now the
10th of June, it could be known with certainty only that in one of four
States he was prowling through some wooded canyon, toiling over a windy
pass, or scaling a mountain sheerly, in his ancient and best loved
sport of prospecting. Knowing his habits, the rashest guesser would not
have attempted to say more definitely where the old man might be.
The most promising plan Toler could devise was to wire the
superintendent of the "One Girl" Mine at Skiplap. The elder Bines, he
knew, had passed through Skiplap about June 1st, and had left, perhaps,
some inkling of his proposed route; if it chanced, indeed, that he had
taken the trouble to propose one.
Pangburn, the mine superintendent, on receipt of the news, despatched
five men on the search in as many different directions. The old man was
now seventy-four, and Pangburn had noted when last they met that he
appeared to be somewhat less agile and vigorous than he had been twenty
years before; from which it was fair to reason that he might be playing
his solitary game at a leisurely pace, and would have tramped no great
distance in the ten days he had been gone. The searchers, therefore,
were directed to beat up the near-by country. To Billy Brue was
allotted the easiest as being the most probable route. He was to follow
up Paddle Creek to Four Forks, thence over the Bitter Root trail to
Eden, on to Oro Fino, and up over Little Pass to Hellandgone. He was to
proceed slowly, to be alert for signs along the way, and to make
inquiries of all he met.
"You're likely to get track of Uncle Peter," said Pangburn, "over along
the west side of Horseback Ridge, just beyond Eden. When he pulled out
he was talking about some likely float-rock he'd picked up over that
way last summer. You'd ought to make that by to-morrow, seeing you've
got a good horse and the trail's been mended this spring. Now you
spread yourself out, Billy, and when you get on to the Ridge make a
special look all around there."
Besides these directions and the telegram from Toler, Billy Brue took
with him a copy of the Skiplap _Weekly Ledge_, damp from the press and
containing the death notice of Daniel J. Bines, a notice sent out by
the News Association, which Billy Brue read with interest as he started
up the trail. The item concluded thus:
"The young and beautiful Mrs. Bines, who had been accompanying her
husband on his trip of inspection over the Sierra Northern, is
prostrated with grief at the shock of his sudden death."
Billy Brue mastered this piece of intelligence after six readings, but
he refrained from comment, beyond thanking God, in thought, that he
could mind his own business under excessive provocation to do
otherwise. He considered it no meddling, however, to remember that Mrs.
Daniel J. Bines, widow of his late employer, could appear neither young
nor beautiful to the most sanguine of newsgatherers; nor to remember
that he happened to know she had not accompanied her husband on his
last trip of inspection over the Kaslo Division of the Sierra Northern
Railway.