right!”

“Well, well,” the miner sighed in conclusion. “So Herb’s lost out! He’s a nervy one, though, obstinate as a mule. Wouldn’t surprise me if he crawled through somehow. I remember him years ago when he had a mine down in Arizona, a big low-grade copper proposition. That was in nineteen four, no,—three. It was another of those big schemes, too big for any one man,—a railroad and a smelter besides the mine. He claimed there was a fortune in it—and I guess it was so—only he was forced to shut down, and the next I heard of him he was out here on the Coast in this Shasta proposition.”

And that was all they had to say about Krutzmacht.

p. 43VI

p. 43

“Do you know who that man is?” Brainard asked the old miner as the gentleman under bonds to return to California strolled out of the smoking room.

“Why, that’s Eddie Hollinger.”

“And who is Mr. Hollinger?”

“Say, young feller, don’t you ever read the papers where you live? Why, he’s the boss of the prize ring business here on the Coast,—the ‘fight trust,’ as they call it. Made lots of money. Mighty fine feller Ed is, too. He’s having his troubles these days the same as the rest of us. They’re trying him for bribery, you know.”

After he had delivered himself of an impassioned defense of the “business men who were being hounded by a lot of hypocrites,” Brainard led him back to Krutzmacht, or as the miner preferred to call him, “that nervy Dutchman.” But beyond elaborating the story of his own personal encounter with the German a number of years before somewhere in Arizona, the miner could add little to what had already been told. The German was a daring and adventurous man, p. 44who had been “known on the Coast” for thirty years or more,—always involved in some large financial venture in which he had been backed by capital from his native land. “But it’s up and down with all of us,” he sighed in conclusion and drifted on to tell his own story. He talked with the volubility and hopefulness of youth. When he said that he hadn’t seen a white man in six months except the dozen “dagoes” working his claim, his volubility seemed to Brainard excusable. It was less 

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