“Easy, Jim,” laughed the promoter; “I know the color of your paints. But never mind,”—this to Philip and Bromley. “If you’ve got something that measures half-way up to those assays you had made last fall, I’m ready to talk turkey with you. But we’ll have to talk fast and work fast—if we want to protect ourselves. The rush for the new diggings isn’t more than a day’s march behind us on the trail we’ve broken over the range, and when it comes, we’ll be swamped. Jim, you old mossback, see if you can’t carve a couple more steaks off that deer bone and broil them for me. I’m as hungry as a hunter.”
XI
Though it was now well into the summer edge of spring for the lower altitudes, a late snow had fallen during the night, and the Continental Divide, framed in the window where Philip was sitting, was clothed in virgin white. In the street below, the snow had already been trampled into a grimy batter by the hoofs and wheels of laboring streams of traffic. Philip looked down upon the busy street scene, trying vainly to realize that this teeming, throbbing, palpitant mining-camp city of thirty-five or forty thousand souls was less than three years old; that, only three backward turnings of the calendar in the past, the marvelous treasure beds in its swelling hills were barely getting themselves discovered.
From such contemplation of the material marvel his thoughts turned inward. For the better part of a year, and with only the brief autumn visit to the great wonder camp to break the wilderness monotonies, he had been an exile with all the familiar human contacts dissevered; it had been a period during which, for him and Bromley, the moving world had ceased to exist. He was just now beginning to apprehend the complete totality of the time eclipse. In the lost interval an exciting national political campaign had run its course, Garfield had been elected president, and his inauguration had taken place; all this without disturbing, by so much as the turning of a leaf, the cosmic procession of the weeks and months in the mountain fastnesses, or recording itself in any way upon the pages of great Nature’s book of the unpeopled immensities.
In the more intimate and personal relations there had been a corresponding break. Never more than a desultory letter-writer, he had sent a card to his mother and sisters in New Hampshire on the occasion of his former trip to Leadville, telling them not to write again until they should hear from him—that he expected to be out of reach of the mails for the duration of the winter. Hence, there had been no home letters awaiting him when he emerged from the western wilderness; nothing to help bridge the separating chasm of the months.
In the few days that had elapsed since his return to Leadville he had been making determined but futile efforts to close the gap; to regard the year of exile as an incident, and to take up the normal thread of life where he had dropped it the preceding spring. The discovery that this could not be done—that the change from flannel shirt, corduroys and miner’s boots to civilized clothes, and from a log cabin in the wilds to a comfortable hotel in the great mining-camp, wrought no miracle of readjustment—was confusing. Was the curious inner consciousness of a changed point of view merely a step forward in character development? Or had the step been taken in the opposite direction—into the region of things primitive and baldly disillusioning? He could not tell; and the inability to make the distinction was strangely disturbing. When the attempt to account for his present mental attitude became a fatiguing strain, he twisted his chair from the window to make it face the scene in the handsomely furnished business office.
At a table in the middle of the room, Bromley, garmented as a gentleman of leisure and wearing his good clothes with an easy and accustomed grace that Philip envied, was talking in low tones with a stockily built man whose dark eyes, heavy brows and aquiline nose gave his features a Jewish cast. Half absently Philip, compared the two faces: Bromley’s high-bred, animated, impishly youthful; Stephen Drew’s strong, kindly—the face of a man whose generous dealings with his friends and business associates had given him a notability as marked as that of the lavish spenders who were making the name of the Colorado “lucky-strike” miner a synonym for all that was fantastic and extravagant.
The moment, as Philip tried, rather ineffectually, to realize, was epochal. Drew and his party of experts had spent a fortnight at the “Little Jean,” exploring, testing, estimating the probable extent of the ore body and preparing samples for additional assays. And now, as the net result, at the farther end of the business office Drew’s attorney was dictating to a young clerk whose pen was flying rapidly over the pages of legal cap paper—using the pen, though one of the new writing machines lately come into use stood on its iron-legged table within easy reach.
After a time the lawyer came to the table in the middle of the room with the finished document in his hands and ran through its provisions with his client and Bromley. Drew nodded and dipped a pen, looking up to say to Philip: “All right, Mr. Trask; if you’ll come and look this over——”
Philip dragged his chair to the table and read the paper Drew passed to him. It was an agreement defining the duties, responsibilities, undertakings and emoluments of the three principals in the “Little Jean”; namely, the two discoverers and the man who was furnishing the working capital; and its provisions were simple and straightforward. On his part the promoter undertook to develop the mine, paying an equitable royalty to the discoverers, the royalty provision including a liberal cash advance.