When the newcomer opened his grip to extract a black skull cap, he had seen that the remaining contents of the bag were a mass of papers, a few bits of loose rock, and a bottle of whisky. Whatever toilet articles the traveler carried were carefully concealed.

Already the oldish, grizzled traveler with the skull cap was at home, the center of a little group of men at one of the card tables,—a bottle of beer in front of him, a cigar tilted at an angle between his teeth. He was conversing with that perfect naturalness and freedom that Brainard had observed was the custom in this large country, even among complete strangers.

“Yes, sir,” he was saying, “I came back from p. 39Alaska in 1907 broke,—that is, what you might call broke,—a couple of thousand dollars all I had in the world. I said to my wife, ‘I’m done with mines! For good. I’ve spent the better part of thirty years chasing gold, and there may be money to be got out of the ground, but it ain’t for me.’ And would you believe it? The next morning I was starting for Union! Met a man I knew at the hotel in Seattle and he showed me some samples of the ore they were taking out there. And I started. The old woman too. Been there ever since!” He paused as if to let the others say “Kismet!” and repeated,—“Been there ever since, working the next claim. My wife died six months ago, and I got lonely and thought I’d come out and see what had happened to Frisco since the quake.”

p. 39

From this point the talk drifted on erratically as the train rushed towards the Sierras. The agreeable young man who read Paradise Lost and was under bonds to justice seemed to have an extensive acquaintance in common with the grizzled miner. They discussed some Scotchman who had been mining but now owned an oil well in the “Midway field” that was reputed to be bringing in five thousand dollars a day. Another of their friends—an Englishman—had a silver “proposition” in Mexico. There was also Jimmie p. 40Birt who owned a string of horses and had sunk a fortune in a mine in British Columbia, but Jimmie, it seemed, was making good in Oregon timber land. So it went with one adventurer after another, roaming this side of the continent, now penniless, to-morrow with millions, restlessly darting from subarctic Alaska to subtropical Mexico along the coast or the mountain spine of the continent. They sought gold and silver and copper, oil and wood and cattle, water-power, wheat, and wine,—it made little odds what. Everything was a “big proposition” in which to make or lose. Brainard drank in the varied biography of this company of adventurers, his brain fired with the 

 Prev. P 22/220 next