Jasper County Democrat, Volume 19, Number 87, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 27 January 1917 — GOLD [ARTICLE]

GOLD

By STEWART EDWARD WHITE

SYNOPSIS TMboC "Ward’s challenge to Frank Mua■oe to a personal encounter to determino whether Munroe is fit to make a trip to California in search of gold is accepted. Munroe gets a hammsriook on Ward and wtim tbo bout. Thor reach Gatun, and. after passing through several villages where Ward always diplomatically handles the natives, they arrive in Panama. Ward puts it up to each man to get 9» in one day. Munroe makes (25 as a laborer. Johnny gambles and gets $220. Ward astounds the party by telling ttow, by shrewd business deals in one day M the Golden City, he accumulated several thousand dollars. The party dig their first gold. They are aoC much encouraged when told that the Value of their first pan is 12 cents. Don Gaspar, a Spaniard, and his manVasquez join forces with the trio •ad the gold' is divided into five parts. After working like beavers several days th* miners decide to take a day off and attend a miners’ meeting in town. U 5 a week in gold and a drink of whisky twice a day Bagsby promises to Isad the party to a rich unexplored mining country. A band of Indians come into the camp tc trade. They are, thankful for blankets. Tw*ar the Indians attempt an ambuscade, but are routed bv rifle shots. \ Johnny and his express messenger Mends arrest two of the Hounds Who me tried for robbery. The lawless element controls tbs " trial and the Hounds are freed. . « Bobberies grow more frequent as the lawless element holds sway. McNally dad Back Barry are murdered after the fri. wipes element gets control of the city. Danny Randall organizes a vigilance committee. It is decided to publicly hang the leaders of the lawless element. The camp buzzes with excitement. Outbursts of the friends of the dbomed men are checked by the determined attitude of Danny Randall and his committee Arriving at San Francisco with Uttie to show for their stay in the gold country, the party hunts up Talbot Ward.

CHAPTER XXIX. The Golden Web. 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?” • “Well 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 nbw we have at least 40,000. The new commercial wharf is nearly half» a mile long and 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 iato the edge of the bay. You wait and see. If you want to make money you just buy some of those water front lots. , You’ll wake up some morning to find ' you’re a mile inland.” j, 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. 1 We discovered Johnny and Yank and I 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 tne 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 awhile. “I suppose the world will never see its like again. It was the chance of a lifetime. I’d like—no, I wouldn’t! I’ve lived too. Well, how for the partnership. As I understand it, for the Hangman’s Gulch end of it we have, all told, about ss,ooo—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 sbmethink to Frank here for my keep. Thought I had about $1,500, 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 216 ounces.”

“About $3,000,”. 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. Wo nccnrnpfinled Talbot- to his hotel, wnere ne managed, after some dlmculty, to procure ua a cot apiece. Our 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. 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 Tai*, hot made his report. I jwish 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 ocene-rwe three weather beaten outlanders listening open mouthed to the. keen, competent, self assured magician who before our eyes spun his glittering fabric. Talbot Ward, had seized upon

slbilltles of the new city. The earn-, Ings on his first scheme—the ship storer' houses and the rental of the brick building on Montgomery street, you will remember—amounted net the first month, I believe, to some $6,000. 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 As fast as he acquired a dollar he Invested it in a new chance, until his interests extended from the Presidio to the water front of the inner bay. These Interests were strange odds and ends. He and a man with bls own given name, Talbot H. Green, had title in much of what is now Harbor 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 w*ater front equities. Talbot mentioned glibly sums that reduced even the most successful mining to a child’s game. The richest strike we had heard rumored 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 j 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 onTthe Plaza where now the Ward block was going up. He paid a percentage down, and gave a mortgage for the rest. Now all the money he could sqeeze 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. “Labor and materials demand gold. But I see my way clear, and a first class, well appointed business block iu 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 Rockett 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 Mnd loans, and once that is begun we are on the road to Millionalreville.” Once more he recapitulated his affairs—the land on the Plaza, two hundred thousand; the building, eighty thousand; the Harbor 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 $5,000 we had sent 'down from Hangman’s Gulch and the cum left from the robbery were not slum-

bering In some banker’s safe, but had been sent dancing with the other doh ! lars at Talbot’p 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 “I have the date it arrived,” he told I us, “and I know just how much actual j capital I had myself at that time, bo t Pm computing your shares in the venture on that It comes to about one-tenth apiece for lank and Jonnny. Frank and I have an agreement already.” Johnny stared at the paper on which the totals had been penciled. “Not any!” he protested vehemently. “It isn’t fair! . You’ve made this thing sheer genius, and it isn’t fair for me to take a tenth of it on the strength of a measly little consignment of 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 fuel the same." said Yank. T , ■ f ■ 'ft • " ■

1 “Boys," argued Talbot earnestly, I “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 l>een to every bank, to every firm, to every man in town, and I couldn’t raise 10 cents more. If yon refuse thia thing you will be doing something that”— “Oh, hush up. Tai!” broke to Johnny gruffly “If that’s bow you feel” — “It is.” . ~ j “It is now,” said Johnny firmly, “10.30 a. m.. but Um going to hava bubbles. If you fellows don’t want me all drunk and dressed up you’vu got to help me drink them.” (To be continued. 1