But Old Man Wright didn't seem to worry none somehow. He was one of the sort that, put him down anywheres and he'd be busy at something. If he was set down on a sand bar beside a creek he'd reach around to find some sticks; and, first thing you know, he'd be building a house out of 'em—he just always was making things somehow. I never seen a man could size up a piece of country for what it would perduce better than him.
"Curly," says he to me one day when I was down in his new office and he was talking about making money, "there's different ways of getting rich," says he, "but only one system. Either get what a mighty few thinks they got to have—that's things for rich folks; or else get something that everybody has got to have whether they want it or not—that's things for poor folks. And when you're in the game you buy when things is low and sell when they is high. Nigh about every man you know plays the game just the other way around. That's why there's so many poor folks," says he. "Yet the game is plumb easy to beat when you know how, if making money is all you care about.
"For instance," says he, "when I bought that bunch of stock in the Lake Electric a while ago it was when nobody wanted it or let on they wanted it. Since then it has riz round fifteen or twenty points and it'll go higher. When I sold the Circle Arrow it was when them folks wanted it right bad. Between you and me, them people paid more for it than it was worth. I may buy it in some day when they don't want it no more."
"You reckon you ever will, Colonel?" says I, plumb happy to think of that.
"If I was alone in the world, with just you, I shorely would right off," says he, "no matter what it cost. With Bonnie Bell in the game, too, I don't know what I'll do nor when I'll do it.
"I don't have such a hard time here," he went on after a while. "For instance, just a few weeks ago I was reading in the papers about this war in Europe—which is a shame and a awful thing; and I hope it won't come here, though if it does you and me are in," says he. "Well, I seen how they make so much powder and sell it—smokeless powder. For that they have to use a awful lot of picric acid."
"What kind of acid?" says I. "Pickles?"
"I don't know," says he. "I wouldn't know it if it was on a plate—only I know they have to make smokeless powder out of it. So I bought all I could find laying round here or there—not very much; only two or three hundred thousand dollars' worth.
"Well," says he, stretching out his legs and yawning, "it's the same old story, Curly. I couldn't help it and I didn't mean to do it the least way in the world; but now this here picric acid—whatever it is—it's worth two or three times what it was just a little while ago. I cleaned up—oh, maybe two or three hundred thousand dollars on that. There ain't enough in these things to keep me very busy. I don't care for making money nohow, because it's so easy. If there was a real man's game now, I wouldn't mind mixing with it."
"Cows is something that folks has to have whether they are rich or poor," says I to him.