Part 22 (2/2)
The rest of the descent was accomplished by means of a succession of ropes suspended from a succession of platforms.
An hour later, when the wagon drove up to the mouth of the tunnel, Mr.
Fetherbee was found standing serenely there, with a half finished cigar between his lips, gazing abstractedly at the landscape.
”Hullo, Fetherbee!” Dayton sung out, as they approached. ”How was it?”
”First rate!” came the answer, in a voice of suppressed elation, which Allery Jones noted and was at something of a loss to interpret.
”Was it all your fancy pictured?” he asked, in rather a sceptical tone.
”All and more!” Mr. Fetherbee declared.
He mounted into the wagon, and the horses started on the home-stretch, not more joyful in the near prospect of their well-earned orgie of oats and hay than Mr. Fetherbee in the feast of narration which was spread for him. Finding it impossible to contain himself another moment, he cried, with an exultant ring in his voice: ”But I say, you fellows!
_I've had an adventure!_”
Then, as they bowled along through a winding valley in which the early September twilight was fast deepening, Mr. Fetherbee gave his initial version of what has since become a cla.s.sic, known among the ever-increasing circle of Mr. Fetherbee's friends as--”An adventure I once had!”
IX.
AN AMATEUR GAMBLE.
The mining boom was on, and Springtown, that famous Colorado health-resort and paradise of idlers, was wide awake to the situation.
The few rods of sidewalk which might fairly be called ”the street,” was thronged all day with eager speculators. Everybody was ”in it,” from the pillars of society down to the slenderest reed of an errand boy who could sc.r.a.pe together ten dollars for a ten-cent stock. As a natural consequence real estate was, for the moment, as flat as a poor joke, and people who had put their money into town ”additions” were beginning to think seriously of planting potatoes where they had once dreamed of rearing marketable dwelling-houses.
Hillerton, the oldest real-estate man in town, was one of the few among the fraternity who had not branched out into stock brokerage. For that reason an air of leisure pervaded his office, and men liked to gather there and discuss the prospects of Lame Gulch. Lame Gulch, as everybody knows, is the new Colorado mining-camp, which is destined eventually to make gold a drug in the market. The camp is just on the other side of the Peak, easily accessible to any Springtown man who is not afraid of roughing it. And to do them justice, there proved to be scarcely an invalid or a college-graduate among them all who did not make his way up there, and take his first taste of hards.h.i.+p like a man.
Hillerton used to sit behind the bal.u.s.trade which divided his sanctum from the main office, and listen with an astute expression, and just the glimmer of a smile, to the talk of the incipient millionaires, who bragged with such ease and fluency of this or that Bonanza. When all declared with one accord that ”if Lame Gulch panned out as it was dead sure to do, Springtown would be the biggest _little_ town in all creation,” Hillerton's smile became slightly accentuated, but a wintry chill of incredulity had a neutralizing effect upon it. As the excitement increased, and his fellow-townsmen manifested a willingness to mortgage every inch of wood and plaster in their possession, Hillerton merely became, if possible, more stringent in the matter of securities.
”We might as well take a mortgage on the town, and done with it,” he remarked to his confidential clerk one Sat.u.r.day evening. ”We shall own it all in six months, anyhow!”
Peckham, the confidential clerk, shrugged his shoulders, and said he ”guessed it was about so.”
Hillerton's confidential clerk usually a.s.sented to the dictum of his princ.i.p.al. It saved trouble and hurt n.o.body. Not that Lewis Peckham was without opinions of his own; but he took no special interest in them, and rarely put himself to the trouble of defending them.
The young man's countenance had never been an expressive one, and during the three years he had spent in Hillerton's employ, his face had lost what little mobility it had ever possessed. He was a pale, hollow-chested individual, with a bulging forehead, curiously marked eyebrows, and a prominent and sensitive nose. A gentleman, too, as anybody could see, but a gentleman of a singularly unsocial disposition.
He looked ten years older than he was--an advantage which Hillerton recognized. His grave, unencouraging manner had a restraining effect upon too exacting tenants; while his actual youthfulness gave Hillerton the advantage over him of thirty years' seniority. Altogether Hillerton placed a high value upon his confidential clerk, and it was with a very genuine good-will that he followed up the last recorded observation, by saying, carelessly:
”I hope you've kept out of the thing yourself, Peckham.”
”Oh, yes!” Peckham answered, in a tone of indifference, copied after Hillerton's own.
Peckham spoke the truth, as it happened, but he would probably have made the same answer whether it had been true or not. He was of the opinion that he was not accountable to Hillerton nor to any one else in the disposition he might make of his legitimate earnings. In fact, it was largely owing to Hillerton's inquiry and the hint of resentment it excited, that Peckham put a hundred dollars into the Yankee Doodle Mining and Milling Co. that very day. To be sure, he acted on a ”straight tip,” but straight tips were as thick as huckleberries in Springtown, and this was the first time he had availed himself of one.
It would be difficult to imagine why Peckham should not have thoroughly liked Hillerton; difficult, that is, to any one not aware of the unusual criterion by which he measured his fellow men. He was himself conscious that he had ceased to ”take any stock” in his employer, since the day on which he had discovered that that excellent man of business did not know the Ninth Symphony from Hail Columbia.
Against Fate, on the other hand, Peckham had several grudges. He was inconveniently poor, he was ill, and he was in exile. With so many hard feelings to cherish against his two immediate superiors--namely, Hillerton and Fate--it is no wonder that Peckham had the reputation of being of a morose disposition.
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