We journeyed to Tonopah—a thirty-six-hour ride. The altitude is 6,000 feet, and it was cold, nasty, penetrating Winter weather. During the last hundred miles of our journey across the mountainous desert we looked out of the car window and saw trainload after trainload of what was said to be ore coming from the opposite direction, and we decided that Tonopah was a sure-enough mining camp and that some of the sensational stories about bonanza mines that we had heard were really true.
BUCKING THE TIGER ON THE DESERT
Arriving In Tonopah after dusk, we sought hotel accommodations. The best we could get was a bed in a forbidding looking one-story annex, walled with undressed pine and roofed with tarpaulin. It was located 100 feet to the rear of the hotel, which was already crowded with miners and soldiers of fortune drawn from all quarters of the world by the mining excitement. Its aspect was so inhospitable that Arkell and I decided not to retire for a little while. We gravitated out toward the barroom, where the click of the roulette wheel caught our ears.
We sat down to watch the game. Soon we were buying stacks of checks and ourselves bucking the tiger excitedly. In an hour the remnants of my $150 passed to the ownership of the man behind the game, and Arkell had put his last two-bit piece on the black and lost.
I looked at him. He looked at me.
"Umph!" he grunted. "Better hit the feathers!"
Meekly I followed him to the annex. When we got under the soiled gray woolen blankets, I remarked: "I've got a cane and an umbrella and three suits of clothes. Do you think we can sell them in the morning for enough to provide breakfast money?"
"Oh, come off!" exclaimed my partner. "Wait till I present my card around this burg in the morning; then we will get all the breakfast we want."
We awoke hungry, as all men have a habit of doing when they are broke.
"I am going over to the Montana-Tonopah Mining Company's office," said Arkell. "A mining engineer by the name of Malcolm Macdonald makes his headquarters over there and he wants to sell some mining properties at Goldfield and in other parts of the State for about three million dollars."