several mines, and proved conclusively that it was far cheaper to bring minerals to the rail in that manner than to sink expensive shafts, raise the ore to the top of a mountain, and cart it to its old level in the valley. Once the thing was indisputable, the young engineer found himself rich and famous. To increase the feeders of the main bore, he drove another short gallery through a mining claim acquired for a few dollars,—a claim deemed worthless owing to a geological fault that traversed its whole length. That was Fate’s opportunity. Doubtless she smiled mischievously when she gave him a vein of rich quartz through which to quarry his way. The mere delving [Pg 21]of the rock had produced two thousand dollars’ worth of ore, of which sum he took a moiety by agreement with the company that purchased his rights. [Pg 21] People in Leadville soon discovered that Spencer was a bright man,—“yes, sir, a citizen of whom the chief mining city of the Rocky Mountains has every reason to be proud,”—and the railway magnate who had nearly ruined him by years of hostility buried the past grandiloquently with a mot. “Charles K. Spencer can’t be sidetracked,” he said. “That K isn’t in his name by accident. Look at it,—a regular buffer of a letter! Tell you what, you may monkey with Charles; but when you hit the K look out for trouble.” Whereupon the miners laughed, and said that the president was a mighty smart man too, and Spencer, who knew he was a thief, but was unwilling to quarrel with him for the sake of the company, thought that a six months’ vacation in Europe would make for peace and general content. He had no plans. He was free to wander whithersoever chance led him. Arriving in London from Plymouth late on a Thursday evening, he took a bus-driver’s holiday on Friday. Finding a tunnel under the Thames in full progress near the hotel, he sought the resident engineer, spoke to him in the lingua franca of the craft, and spent several dangerous and enjoyable hours in crawling through all manner of uncomfortable passages bored by human worms beneath the bed of the river. [Pg 22] [Pg 22] And this was Saturday, and here he was, at three o’clock in the afternoon, turning over in his mind the best way of sending on an expensive trip abroad a girl who had not the remotest notion of his existence. It was a whim, and a harmless one, and
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