“Look here, Jim: why, I'm just overloaded with shares and stocks,” said Barker, smiling.
“Not one of which you could realize on without sacrifice. Barker, three years ago you had three hundred thousand dollars put to your account at San Francisco.”
“Yes,” said Barker, with a quiet reminiscent laugh. “I remember I wanted to draw it out in one check to see how it would look.”
“And you've drawn out all in three years, and it looks d——d bad.”
“How did you know it?” asked Barker, his face beaming only with admiration of his companion's omniscience.
“How did I know it?” retorted Stacy. “I know YOU, and I know the kind of people who have unloaded to you.”
“Come, Stacy,” said Barker, “I've only invested in shares and stocks like everybody else, and then only on the best advice I could get: like Van Loo's, for instance,—that man who was here just now, the new manager of the Empire Ditch Company; and Carter's, my own Kitty's father. And when I was offered fifty thousand Wide West Extensions, and was hesitating over it, he told me YOU were in it too—and that was enough for me to buy it.”
“Yes, but we didn't go into it at his figures.”
“No,” said Barker, with an eager smile, “but you SOLD at his figures, for I knew that when I found that YOU, my old partner, was in it; don't you see, I preferred to buy it through your bank, and did at 110. Of course, you wouldn't have sold it at that figure if it wasn't worth it then, and neither I nor you are to blame if it dropped the next week to 60, don't you see?”
Stacy's eyes hardened for a moment as he looked keenly into his former partner's bright gray ones, but there was no trace of irony in Barker's. On the contrary, a slight shade of sadness came over them. “No,” he said reflectively, “I don't think I've ever been foolish or followed out my OWN ideas, except once, and that was extravagant, I admit. That was my idea of building a kind of refuge, you know, on the site of our old cabin, where poor miners and played-out prospectors waiting for a strike could stay without paying anything. Well, I sunk twenty thousand dollars in that, and might have lost more, only Carter—Kitty's father—persuaded me—he's an awful clever old fellow—into turning it into a kind of branch hotel of Boomville, while using it as a hotel to take poor chaps who couldn't pay, at half prices, or quarter prices, PRIVATELY, don't you see, so as to spare their pride,—awfully pretty, wasn't it?—and make the hotel profit by it.”