“What’s that?” demanded Kingsley. “What do you know about it?”
“Then, after the son is well settled, along comes one of father’s partners, East, to sell stock, and he has a sample of the clean-up—a big hunk of gold—and it’s always a real ingot, too.”
“It was real,” insisted the judge, passionately. “I went to the city and had it tested by a jeweler who is a friend of mine. They offered me a chance to make money on account of my old friendship. It did not seem like a gold-brick game. I could not believe it was. I did not dare to believe it was. I needed money so badly!”
“But it was, sir.”
“I mortgaged, I borrowed, I pawned! They offered me a chance to make money because I was a prominent man and could help them sell their stock. They wanted me to be sure that the proposition was a good one—that the gold was honest. They took my last five thousand dollars! My God! I bought a gold brick! I bought it like other fools have bought.”
“They always put new trimmings on the old game, Judge Kingsley, and make it look attractive.”
He looked at me strangely and did not answer.
“I suppose they worked it as usual,” I went on, feeling just a bit proud of my knowledge. I reflected that he might be more thankful for his volunteer if I showed him that I was no greenhorn. His mouth had been running away with him in his wild eagerness to unload the sorrows from his soul. All at once he was showing symptoms of stiffening a bit, as if he wondered why he had opened his heart to such a one as Ross Sidney.
I needed all his confidence—the flow was lessening—and so I “shot the well,” as the oil fellows say.
“After they had given you all kinds of nice entertainment in the city, you started for home and opened your package on the train and found a lead junk and a letter advising you to go home and keep still and never believe strangers again.”