“I think that is about as we talked,” Drew said. “If you and Mr. Bromley are agreeable, we may as well sign up and call it a deal.”
With a hand that shook a little in spite of his best effort to hold it steady, Philip signed and passed the papers and pen to Bromley.
“Wigglesworth?” the promoter queried, when the papers came back to him with Bromley’s signature. “Is that a family name?”
“Very much so,” admitted the play-boy, with a grin.
“I used to know some Wigglesworths in Philadelphia. Relations of yours?”
“They are, indeed. My mother was a Wigglesworth.”
Stephen Drew signed as lessee of the “Little Jean” with the intricate pen flourish familiar to every bank teller in Leadville and Denver, and the young clerk attested the signatures as notary. The formalities concluded, Drew spoke of the practical details.
“We’ll go in as soon as we can get in with the machinery for a mill. We’ll have to have our own mill, of course. Freighting the machinery over the range will be a costly job, but there is no way to avoid it. Rich as the ore is, it wouldn’t pay to jack freight it out over the mountains. However, you have ore enough on the dump to take care of the overhead.”
“I’m not sure that we don’t owe you an apology for not discovering our mine in some place nearer the broad highways,” Bromley put in whimsically. “It is due to us to say that we did try, pretty faithfully, to do that very thing, before we crossed over to the Western slope, but we couldn’t make it.”
Drew smiled. “Any old miner will tell you that the gold is where you find it, and not anywhere else. Fortunately for all of us, the ‘Little Jean’ is rich enough to warrant the building of a small mill, even at the high cost of taking the machinery over the range piecemeal—rich enough and with an ore body large enough. But I take it you two are not very pointedly interested in the operating details, so long as the dividends are forthcoming. Have you made any plans for the summer?—for yourselves, I mean?”