“This is splendid!” said Margaret, looking curiously about the planked interior of the car. “Why do you want to leave Lincoln?” she went on in a lower tone, after a pause.
“I don’t want to leave Lincoln.”
“But you said just now—”
“It seems to me, by Jove, that I’ve done nothing but leave places ever since I came West!” Elliott exclaimed, impatiently. “That was ten years ago. I came out from Baltimore, you know. I was born there, and I learned newspaper work on the Despatch there, and then I came West and got a job on the Denver Telegraph.”
“At a high salary, I suppose.”
“So high that it seemed a sort of gold mine, after Eastern rates. But it didn’t last. The paper was sold and remodelled inside a year, and most of the reporters fired. I couldn’t find another newspaper job just then, so I went out with a survey party in Dakota for the winter and nearly froze to death, but when I got back and drew all my accumulated salary, I bought a half-interest in a gold claim in the Black Hills. Mining in the Black Hills was just beginning to boom then, and I sold my claim in a couple of months for three thousand. I made another three thousand in freighting that summer, and if I had stayed at it I might have got rich, but I came down to Omaha and lost it all playing the wheat market. I had a sure tip.”
“Six thousand dollars! That’s more money than I ever saw all at once,” Margaret commented.
“It was more money than I saw for some time after that; but that’s a fair specimen of the way I did things. Once I walked into Seattle broke, and came out with four thousand dollars. I cleaned up nearly twenty thousand once on real estate in San Francisco. Afterwards I went down to Colorado, mining. I could almost have bought up the whole Cripple Creek district when I got there, if I had had savvy enough, but I let the chance slip, and when I did go to speculating my capital went off like smoke. The end of it was that I had to go into the mines and swing a pick myself.”
“You were game, it seems, anyway,” said Margaret, who was listening with absorbed interest. The sky was clearing a little, and the hail had ceased, but the rain still swept in gusty clouds over the brown prairie.
“I had to be. It did me good, and I got four dollars a day, and in six months I was working a claim of my own. By this time I thought I was wise, and I sold it as soon as I found a sucker. I got ten thousand for it, and I heard afterwards that he took fifty thousand out of it.”