He thrust away his watch and the pistol and with a shout of joy seized both my hands.

“Well! well! well! well!” he cried over and over again. “But I am glad to see you! I’d no idea where you were or what you were doing! Why couldn’t you write a man occasionally?”

“I don’t know,” said I, rather blankly. “I don’t believe it ever occurred to us we could write.”

“Where are the others? Are they with you?”

“We’ll look them up,” said I.

Together we walked away, arm in arm. Talbot had not changed, except that he had discarded his miner’s rig, and was now dressed in a rather quiet cloth suit, a small soft hat, and a blue flannel shirt. The trousers he had tucked into the tops of his boots. I thought the loose, neat costume very becoming to him. After a dozen swift inquiries as to our welfare, he plunged headlong into enthusiasms as to the town.

“It’s the greatest city in the world!” he cried; then catching my expression, he added, “or it’s going to be. Think of it, Frank! A year ago it had less than a thousand people, and now we have at least forty thousand. The new Commercial Wharf is nearly half a mile long and 405 cost us a hundred and fifty thousand dollars, but we raised the money in ten minutes! We’re going to build two more. And Sam Brannan and a lot of us are talking of putting down plank roads. Think what that will mean! And there’s no limit to what we can do in real estate! Just knock down a few of these hills to the north-”

He stopped, for I was laughing.

“Why not drain the bay?” I suggested. “There’s a plenty of land down there.”

“Well,” said Talbot in a calmer manner, “we won’t quite do that. But we’ll put some of those sand hills into the edge of the bay. You wait and see. If you want to make money, you just buy some of those waterfront lots. You’ll wake up some morning to find you’re a mile inland.”

I laughed again; but just the other day, in this year 1899, I rode in a street car where fifty years ago great ships had lain at anchor.

We discovered Johnny and Yank, and pounded each other’s backs, and had drinks, and generally worked off our high spirits. Then we adjourned to a corner, lit cigars–a tremendous luxury for us miners–and plunged into recital. Talbot listened to us attentively, his eyes bright with interest, occasionally breaking in on the narrator to ask one of the others to supplement some too modestly worded statement.

“Well!” he sighed when we had finished. “You boys have certainly had a time! What an experience! You’ll never forget it!” He brooded a while. “I suppose the world will never see its like again. It was the chance of a 406 lifetime. I’d like–no I wouldn’t! I’ve lived, too. Well, now for the partnership. As I understand it, for the Hangman’s Gulch end of it, we have, all told, about five thousand dollars–at any rate, that was the amount McClellan sent down to me.”

“That’s it,” said I.

“And the Porcupine Flat venture was a bad loss?”

“The robbers cleaned us out there except for what we sent you,” I agreed regretfully.

“Since which time Yank has been out of it completely?”

“Haven’t made a cent since,” acknowledged Yank cheerfully, “and I owe something to Frank, here, for my keep. Thought I had about fifteen hundred dollars, but I guess I ain’t.”

“At Italian Bar,” went on Talbot, “how much did you make?”

“Doesn’t matter what I made,” interposed Johnny, “for, as Frank told you, it’s all at the bottom of the Sacramento River.”

“I did pretty well,” said I, and pulled out two hundred and sixteen ounces.

“About three thousand dollars,” computed Talbot. “You’re the plutocrat, all right. Well, I’ve done pretty well with this end of the partnership, too. I think–but I guess we’d better take a fresh day to it. It must be ungodly late. Good Lord, yes! Three o’clock!”

Nobody would have thought so. The place seemed nearly as full as ever. We accompanied Talbot to his hotel, where he managed, after some difficulty, to procure us a cot apiece.

407Our sleep was short; and in spite of our youth and the vitality we had stored in the healthy life of the hills we felt dragged out and tired. Five hours’ sleep in two days is not enough. I was up a few minutes before the rest; and I sat in front of the hotel basking in the sun like a lizard. The let-down from the toil and excitement of the past months still held me. I thought with lazy satisfaction of the two thousand-odd dollars which was my share of our partnership. It was a small sum, to be sure; but, then, I had never in my life made more than twelve dollars a week, and this had cost me nothing. Now that definitely I had dropped overboard my hopes of a big strike, I unexpectedly found that I had dropped with them a certain feeling of pride and responsibility as well. As long as I had been in the mining business I had vaguely felt it incumbent on me to do as well as the rest, were that physically possible. I was out of the mining business. As I now looked at it, I had been mighty well paid for an exciting and interesting vacation. I would go back to New York at a cost of two or three hundred dollars, and find some good opening for my capital and ability.

Talbot appeared last, fresh and smiling. Breakfast finished, he took us all with him to the new brick building. After some business we adjourned once more to the Arcade. There Talbot made his report.

I wish I could remember it, and repeat it to you verbatim. It was worth it. But I cannot; and the most I can do is to try to convey to you the sense of that scene–we three tanned, weather-beaten outlanders listening open-mouthed to the keen, competent, self-assured magician 408 who before our eyes spun his glittering fabric. Talbot Ward had seized upon the varied possibilities of the new city. The earnings on his first scheme–the ship storehouses, and the rental of the brick building on Montgomery Street, you will remember–amounted net, the first month, I believe, to some six thousand dollars. With his share of this money he had laid narrow margins on a dozen options. Day by day, week by week, his operations extended. He was in wharves, sand lots, shore lots, lightering, plank roads, a new hotel. Day after day, week after week, he had turned these things over, and at each turn money had dropped out. Sometimes the plaything proved empty, and then Talbot had promptly thrown it away, apparently without afterthought or regret. I remember some of the details of one deal:

“It looked to me,” said Talbot, “that somebody ought to make a good thing in flour, the way things were going. It all comes from South America just now, so enough capital ought to be able to control the supply. I got together four of the big men here and we agreed with the agents to take not less than a hundred and fifty thousand barrels nor more than two hundred thousand barrels at fourteen dollars. Each firm agreed to take seven hundred thousand dollars’ worth; and each agreed to forfeit one hundred thousand dollars for failure to comply. Flour could be held to twenty-five to thirty dollars a barrel; so there was a good thing.”

“I should think so,” I agreed. “Where did you come in?”

“Percentage of the profits. They took and sold quite a heap of flour at this rate–sixty thousand barrels to be 409 exact–on which there was a net profit of seven hundred thousand dollars. Then one of those freak things happened that knocked us all silly. Flour just dropped down out of sight. Why? Manipulation. They’ve got a smart lot out here. The mines had flour enough for the time being; and the only thing that held the price up was the uncertainty of just where the flour was coming from in the future. Well, the other crowd satisfied that uncertainty, and our flour dropped from about twenty-five dollars down to eight. We had sold sixty thousand barrels, and we had ninety thousand to take on our contract, on each one of which we were due to lose six dollars. And the other fellows were sitting back chuckling and waiting for us to unload cheap flour.”

“What was there to do?”

Talbot laughed. “I told our crowd that I had always been taught that when a thing was hot, to drop it before I got burned. If each firm paid its forfeit it would cost us four hundred thousand dollars. If we sold all the flour contracted for at the present price, we stood to lose nearer six hundred thousand. So we simply paid our forfeits, threw over the contract, and were three hundred thousand ahead.”

“But was that fair to the flour people?” I asked doubtfully.

“Fair?” retorted Talbot. “What in thunder did they put the forfeit clause in for if it wasn’t expected we might use it?”

As fast as he acquired a dollar, he invested it in a new chance, until his interests extended from the Presidio 410 to the waterfront of the inner bay. These interests were strange odds and ends. He and a man with his own given name, Talbot H. Green, had title in much of what is now Harbour View–that is to say, they would have clear title as soon as they had paid heavy mortgages. His shares in the Commercial Wharf lay in the safes of a banking house, and the dollars he had raised on them were valiantly doing duty in holding at bay a pressing debt on precariously held waterfront equities. Talbot mentioned glibly sums that reduced even the most successful mining to a child’s game. The richest strike we had heard rumoured never yielded the half of what our friend had tossed into a single deal. Our own pitiful thousands were beggarly by comparison, insignificant, not worth considering.

Of all the varied and far-extending affairs the Ward Block was the flower. Talbot owned options, equities, properties, shares in all the varied and numerous activities of the new city; but each and every one of them he held subject to payments which at the present time he could by no possibility make. Mortgages and loans had sucked every immediately productive dollar; and those dollars that remained were locked tight away from their owner until such time as he might gain possession of a golden key. This did not worry him.

“They are properties that are bound to rise in value,” he told us. “In fact, they are going up every minute we sit here talking. They are futures.”

Among other pieces, Talbot had been able to buy the lot on the Plaza where now the Ward Block was going up. He paid a percentage down, and gave a mortgage for the 411 rest. Now all the money he could squeeze from all his other interests he was putting into the structure. That is why I rather fancifully alluded to the Ward Block as the flower of all Talbot’s activities.

“Building is the one thing you have to pay cash for throughout,” said Talbot regretfully. “Labour and materials demand gold. But I see my way clear; and a first-class, well-appointed business block in this town right now is worth more than the United States mint. That’s cash coming in for you–regularly every month. It will pay from the start four or five times the amount necessary to keep everything else afloat. Jim Reckett has taken the entire lower floor at thirty thousand. The offices upstairs will pay from a thousand a month up and they are every one rented in advance. Once we get our rents coming in, the strain is relieved. I can begin to take up my mortgages and loans, and once that is begun we are on the road to Millionaireville.”

Once more he recapitulated his affairs–the land on the Plaza two hundred thousand; the building eighty thousand; the Harbour View lands anything they might rise to, but nearly a quarter million now; ten thousand par value of the wharf stock already paying dividends; real estate here and there and everywhere in the path of the city’s growth; shares in a new hotel that must soon touch par; the plank road–as we jotted down the figures, and the magic total grew, such trifling little affairs as gold mines dropped quite below the horizon. We stared at Talbot fascinated.

And then for the first time we learned that the five 412 thousand dollars we had sent down from Hangman’s Gulch, and the sum left from the robbery, was not slumbering in some banker’s safe, but had been sent dancing with the other dollars at Talbot’s command.

“I didn’t know just what you fellows intended,” said he, “but we were partners up there at the mines, and I concluded it would be all right. You didn’t mean-”

“Sure not!” broke in Johnny heartily. “You’re welcome to mine.”

“Same here,” agreed Yank and I.

And then Talbot let us see that he considered us to that extent partners in the business.

“I have the date it arrived,” he told us, “and I know just how much actual capital I had myself at that time. So I’m computing your shares in the venture on that basis. It comes to about one tenth apiece for Yank and Johnny. Frank and I have an agreement already.”

Johnny stared at the paper on which the totals had been pencilled.

“Not any!” he protested vehemently. “It isn’t fair! You’ve made this thing by sheer genius, and it isn’t fair for me to take a tenth of it on the strength of a measly little consignment of gold dust. You give me your note for a thousand dollars–or whatever the sum is–at interest, if you want to, and that’s all that is coming to me.”

“I feel the same,” said Yank.

“Boys,” argued Talbot earnestly, “that doesn’t go. That five thousand saved me. It came at a time when I had to have money or go down. I had been to every bank, to every firm, to every man in town, and I couldn’t 413 raise ten cents more. If you refuse this thing, you will be doing something that-”

“Oh, hush up, Tal!” broke in Johnny gruffly; “if that’s how you feel-”

“It is.”

“It is now,” said Johnny firmly, “10:30 A.M., but I’m going to have bubbles. If you fellows don’t want me all drunk and dressed up, you’ve got to help me drink them.”