"Three millions!" I exclaimed.
"Yes," said Arkell. "I'll get the facts and wire them to my friend Joe Hoadley in New York."
"Say, Bill," I remonstrated, "they have a privately-owned jerkline telegraph in this town, and if you send any 'phony' telegrams over the wire, they'll be on to you. So don't do any of that kind of business."
"Nothing of the kind!" replied he promptly. "Any message I send to Hoadley he'll answer."
"I guess you have it fixed on the other end," I remarked. He laughed.
We strolled over to the State Bank and Trust Company building, across the street, and there met Malcolm Macdonald, a mining engineer from Butte, Montana, and his friend, Mr. Dunlap, who was at the time secretary of the Montana-Tonopah Mining Company. The conversation was not more than five minutes old when Arkell suggested that he would like to eat breakfast, but "didn't want any restaurants in his," intimating that he would like to have some good, old-fashioned home cooking. Mr. Dunlap remarked modestly that the camp was too young to boast of much home cooking, but that if we would be his guests he would guarantee to make arrangements for some special cooking at the Palace restaurant.
BIDDING $3,000,000 WHEN BROKE
After breakfast, which consisted of mountain trout, the flavor of which was more delicious than anything I had tasted in many years—probably because of the artificial hunger which an empty purse had created—we returned to the office of the bank. There Arkell explained to Mr. Macdonald that he wanted "a big mining proposition or nothing." He said he represented big Eastern capital and that he was prepared to pay from one to three millions for the right kind of property. Mr. Macdonald named some mines and prospects which he said he was willing to sacrifice for $3,000,000.
One of them was the Simmerone, of Goldfield, which Mr. Macdonald offered for $1,000,000. We afterward learned that he had paid $32,000 for it. At that time there was a six-foot hole in the ground, and the whole property contained less than five acres. A stockade had been built around the workings on account of the extreme richness of the ore that had been opened at grass-roots.
Mr. Macdonald also offered for sale a lead property at Reveille and a lead-silver property at Tybo, both situated about 70 to 100 miles from a railroad. (Later these properties, along with some others, were promoted by Charles Minzesheimer & Company, a New York Stock Exchange house, as the Nevada Smelters & Mines Company and passed on to the public at a valuation of $5,000,000. The market value of the entire capitalization of this company is now less than $10,000.) These "mines" were to be put into the deal at $1,000,000 each.