“We found a train was starting at the station, and I got Billy in, all broke down. Getting towards ’Frisco he pulled himself together, he’d been thinking a lot on the journey, and I got the surprise of my life to find him cheerful all of a sudden.
“‘Do you know what I’m thinking?’ says he. ‘I’m thinking this thing is my mascot, and I’ve been trying to get rid of my luck all this time. It got me free of that woman, for we never pulled together proper, it got me in with you and Slane, and you’ve made a man of me. Every time I tried to lose it, bad luck came to me, and look at the luck she’s had since she lost it, married to that brute of a Burstall. It’s my luck I’ve been trying to get rid of, and now I know, I’m going to do big things.’
“I left him at the station, and met him a year later all broke down and half in rags.
“‘Why, Billy.’ I said, ‘what ails you?’
“‘I lost my mascot,’ says he. ‘I was getting on fine and making money hand over fist when a damn landlady pinched it out of my wardrobe, though I never could bring it home to her. It took all the heart out of me and things went wrong all round.’
“I gave him a dollar and never saw him again,” finished Brent, “and I’ve just told you about him to show you what nerves and fancies and such like may bring a man to.—Now as to that dead Chink.”
But I wasn’t bothering any more about the Chink, maybe because of the fresh air of the harbour, maybe because of the awful warning contained in the story of Billy Broke.
CHAPTER XII.
THE MAKING OF A MILLIONAIRE
I
I’ve told you, said Brent, that Slane had an old uncle in San Francisco, Pat O’Brien, worth over two million dollars they said he was and I don’t doubt them. Pat had landed in New York somewhere in the ’fifties or ’sixties without a jitney, then he’d come along to ’Frisco; he hadn’t struck gold, he hadn’t struck oil, nor Luck in any special way as far as we could make out, he’d just become a millionaire, and one day when we were on the trip back to ’Frisco with a full cargo, I said to Buck: “Look here, Buck,” I says, “you and me has been trading together the last ten years. We’re up to every game on the Pacific coast, we aren’t simple sailors no more than a mule is all an ass. Well, we’ve got sixty thousand dollars between us put by, but four years ago we had forty thousand. We make our money hard and earn it slow, seems to me. Look at Pat, he’s none of our natural advantages; the chap can’t more than read and write his name, he’s only one brain and we’ve got two, but look at him, rolling in dollars. How’s it done?”