From his chair Dan asked: “You mean the Bentley claim?”
“Measles,” his friend said comically, with a grin. “Your father was sick to death with them. When he was sitting up for the first time, peeling in his room, there was a fellow, an Englishman, a total stranger, come in to see him. ‘Better clear out of here,’ your father says to him. ‘I’m shedding the damnedest disease for a grown man that ever was caught.’ ‘I’m not afraid of it,’ the Englishman said, ‘I’m shedding worse.’ When your father asked him what that was, he said the idea that he could make any money in the West. He told your father that he was going back to England and give up his western schemes, and that he had a claim to sell, and he told Blair where it lay. ‘Who has seen it?’ your father asked. ‘Any of my men?’ And the Englishman told your father that nobody had wanted to buy it and that was why he had come to him. He said he thought his only chance to sell was to hold up some blind man on his dying bed and that he had heard that Blair was too sick to stir out of his room and to prospect. Your father liked the fellow’s cheek and when he found out that he had the maps with him, your father bought the whole blooming sweep at the man’s price, which was a mere song.
“Your father never went near his purchase for a year or more, and when he had turned the mine he was managing over to the original company, with me as manager in his place, at a salary of twenty thousand dollars a year, he said to me one day, ‘Ruggles, you’ll be sorry to know that the fun is all over, I’ve struck oil.’ But the oil was copper. The whole blooming business that he’d bought of that Englishman was rich with ore. Well, that’s the story of Blairtown,” Ruggles said. “You were born there and your mother died there.”
Dan said: “Galorey told me what dad did later for the man that sold him the mine, and it was just like everything else he did, for dad was all right, just as good as they come.”
Ruggles agreed. He left his reminiscences abruptly. “Your dad and me had the fun in our time; now you are going to get the other kind; you’re going to make the dust fly that he dug up.”
And the rich young man said musingly: “I’ll bet it isn’t half as good at my end.”
And Ruggles agreed: “Not by a jugful.” And followed: “What’s on to-night? Mandalay?”
Dan’s fury at Prince Poniotowsky came back. “I guess you thought I was a little loose in the lid, didn’t you, Josh, going so often to the same play?”
“You wouldn’t have been the first rich man that had the same disease,” Ruggles answered.
“There is nothing the matter with Mandalay, but I’m not gone on any actress living, Josh; you are in the wrong pew.”