"It was, once," I admitted.
"All right. You're going to handle the money end of this job in town. When you're ready, pull your freight for the camp, open an office, organize your force, and get busy with the machinery people, the banks, and the smelters. We'll be shipping in car-load lots within a week."
Two hours later I boarded a car on the nearest trolley line. On the long, sweeping rush down the hills I put in the time trying, as any bewildered son of Adam might, to find myself and to rise in some measure to the stupendous demands of the new task which lay before me.
But at the car-stopping in Bennett Avenue it was the escaped convict, rather than the newly created business manager of the Little Clean-Up, who slipped into the nearest hardware shop and purchased a revolver.
XVII
Aladdin's Lamp
It is no part of my purpose to burden this narrative with the story of the development of our mine. Let it be sufficient to say that it speedily proved to be one of the most phenomenal "producers" among the later discoveries in the Cripple Creek district. The stories of such spectacular successes have been made commonplace by the newspapers, and that of the "Little Clean-Up" would—if I should give the real name of our bonanza—be remembered and recognized by many who saw it grow by leaps and bounds from a mere prospect hole to a second "Gold Coin."
To summarize briefly. Within a month we had settled down to business and were incorporated, with Barrett as president, and Gifford, who chose his own job, resident manager and superintendent. The secretary-treasurership, combined under one office head, fell to me. With a modern mining plant in operation, the sinking and driving paused only at the hours of shift-changing; and after we began shipping in quantity our bank balances grew like so many juggler's roses—this though we had to spend money like water in the various lawsuits which sprang up from day to day.
Many of these suits were based upon cross-claims—contentions that we were overlapping other properties—and most of these we were able to compromise by buying off the litigants. By this means we acquired the entire area of the original triangle. When the news of our strike reached Nebraska, the owners of the Mary Mattock sought to break their sale to us on the ground that we had stacked the cards against them. But our lawyers were too shrewd to be caught in such a flimsy net as this. At Benedict's suggestion we drove a drainage tunnel on the purchased property and unwatered the three shafts which the Nebraskans had sunk; an expedient which enabled us to prove to the satisfaction of the courts that the Mary Mattock, at the time of its abandonment by its original owners, was nothing more than a series of prospect holes, and that the property was valueless save for a dumping ground.