"You are awfully good," said Miller; "but you are looking from your standpoint. I looked from mine, and I could not do differently. But tell me about this dreadful business. I saw about Wright, and read the account of this fearful accident of yesterday as I was coming up in the train, but still, there must have been some blundering somewhere."
Everything was explained, and also what had been discovered of the effects of the dead miners.
"Poor grand souls," said Miller. "It was a tough ending. Never before did three such royal hearts stop beating in a single fortnight on the Comstock."
Ashley returned, and, with words full of affectionate reproach, greeted Miller.
Ashley had found everything at the bank as the book indicated, and the undertaker had promised that Brewster's remains should be ready for shipment on the evening of the next day.
Then the question of the dispatch to the family came up again.
"Before deciding upon that," said Miller, "let me tell you something:
"When I took the money to pay the bills, I had, with a little of my own, something over seven hundred dollars. I bought on a margin of only twenty-five per cent.—the broker was my friend—all the Silver Hill that the money would purchase. I thought I had a sure thing. My informant was a Silver Hill miner. I believed I could multiply the money by three within as many days. In five days it fell thirty per cent. What could I do? A note from the broker asking me to call, received the evening before I went away, decided me. I went away, but when I saw by dispatches that Wright had been killed, and I could get nothing to do, I determined to come back.
"Well, I met my broker this morning. He asked me to call at his place. There he informed me that the day he purchased Silver Hill he met the superintendent and learned from him that there was not yet a development; that the stock was more liable to fall than to rise for two or three weeks to come, the rage being just then for north end stocks. He could not find me, and accordingly, on his own responsibility, he sold the stock, losing nothing but commissions and cost of dispatches.
"There was a little lull in Sierra Nevada that day, and, believing it was good, he bought with my money and on my account. As it shot up he kept buying. At last, a week ago, he had two thousand shares and sold five hundred, and by the sale paid himself all up except $21,000.