Cyrus, my princely buck, if there was any “peculiar light” in pretty Polly’s eyes, it was admiration for your manly figure. You are too modest to ever do yourself justice.
I am glad you found Ketchum and the Sure Thing Mining Company. I had to laugh at the mystery you make of that back room into which you were not permitted to peep. No doubt he was working some pilgrim in there to whom he expected to sell stock, and did not want to be interrupted.
I met a broker the other day who knew him well here. He is a scamp, as I thought; but not exactly the kind of scamp I thought. He has had a career on the Exchange here and was once a heavy operator and made big money, but his reputation was never first-class and it has become decidedly odorous of late years through his connection with snide stock schemes of one kind and another. But he has kept out of jail and isn’t a person a man can exactly refuse to speak to.
He worked a Napoleonic confidence deal in grain here, some five or six years back, and came within an ace of cleaning up a million or more on it; but the fraud was discovered and the bubble exploded, leaving him beggared both in fortune and reputation. He had tangled a lot of respectable operators up in the scheme, so that it did not look so very bad for him personally, and he escaped prosecution. Since then he has figured as a promoter, keeping himself in the shade.
Parsons, Polly’s father, was the man who discovered and defeated his fraud; and the story goes here, that in revenge, he set the trap into which Parsons fell and lost all except his honor. Parsons has a good name here still, I find, among the brokers, because he made an honest settlement, although it left him penniless and broken-spirited. It is strange that he hasn’t come to see me. I tried to find him when I first came; but he was always somewhere else, and when I went to Milwaukee, I left a note for him, but have heard nothing. I shall try to see him before I leave.
I find Ketchum has a wife and some children here, and that he doesn’t figure as a Lothario at all as I suspected. On the contrary, he is quite a model in his domestic relations—takes his family to church and all that, and is a shining light in the Sunday-school and the Y. M. C. A. So I fancy our pretty Polly is in no great danger from him. It is singular though, why he should have engaged the daughter of a man whom he must hate, as his confidential clerk—and at such a preposterous salary, too. It is suspicious; but after all, it may be a freak of kindness, finding the man whose ruin he has planned so destitute. It is just as safe to take the charitable view as any, even of a scamp. Human motives are always mixed.
I cannot say when I will be at home; but write often, directing to Denver, and keep a brotherly eye on our pretty Polly.
Yours,
Fitz-Mac.
VI.
Grand Pacific Hotel,
Chicago, April 9, 9 o’clock P. M.