The Long Chance

by Peter B. Kyne

“However, I will not have sufficient funds on hand to pay them ten dollars per acre spot cash, so I shall turn over to them their signed contracts and thus relieve them of that bugbear, and for these three-dollar contracts they shall credit me with a payment of four dollars and twenty-five cents per acre on the land! I will secure them for the balance by a first mortgage on the property! And with that accomplished, I court an official investigation. Come on, you secret service operatives, and prove Bob McGraw a crook. I am a crook, and I know it, but nobody else shall know it and I have never been accused of talking in my sleep. I'm a crook, but I'm an honest crook, and the ends justify the means. Besides, I'm going to present every one of my clients with a cheek for three thousand six hundred and seventy dollars for the mere scratch of a pen and the use of their constitutional right to purchase lieu land. Why, I'm a philanthropist! I'm going to make fifty men happy by giving them a lot of money for something they never knew they had. Three thousand six hundred and seventy dollars for the use of one constitutional right, when the market price is a hundred! McGraw, my boy, this must never leak out. If it does, your sanity will be questioned, in addition to your morality.”

Thus figured Bob McGraw, the sage of Donnaville. Let him but get his applications past the land ring's tool in the state land office, and a receipt issued for his first payment, and Donnaville would be no longer a dream. Should the applications be rejected later on some flimsy pretext, he would commence a mandamus suit to enforce the selection of his lands, and force action of the pending applications of the land ring, whereby they so artfully “tied up the basis” of exchange. If he should find himself opposed by a corrupt judge who should rule against him, he would not be daunted. If beaten in the Superior Court he would appeal the case to the United States Circuit Court, for Bob McGraw had a sublime faith in the ability of Truth, crushed to earth, to rise again and kick the underpinning from crookedness and graft, provided one never acknowledged defeat. And he could go into court with clean hands, for he broke no law himself and he would induce no one else to break it, in thought, spirit or action!

The road to Donnaville stretched ahead of him now, smooth and white and free from ruts, and with but one bridge to cross. For the successful crossing of that bridge Bob McGraw had not evolved a plan, for he was merely a human being, and human cunning has its limitations. It was a bridge which he must cross when he came to it. He only knew that he must make the effort on a certain day—the day that Owens river valley should be thrown open to entry. He must be first at the window of the land office, and once before that window, the future of Donnaville, the future of Bob McGraw and his sweetheart in San Pasqual, lay in the laps of the gods. He must manage somehow to get his applications filed that day, without designating the basis of the exchange of school lands for the lieu lands which he sought; for that was information which Bob McGraw did not possess, and should it come into his possession the day after the valley was opened for entry, it would be worthless; for the land ring, in the parlance of the present day, would have “beaten him to it.”

To get those precious filings accepted! That was all that worried him now. Prior to his visit to Homer Dunstan, this task had seemed to Bob the least of his worries compared with the titanic task of accumulating the money necessary to pay for the land when the filings should be approved. Yesterday everything had revolved around the necessity for thirty-nine thousand dollars, until the contemplation of this monetary axis had threatened to set his reason tottering on its throne. But that worry no longer existed. Homer Dunstan had indicated very clearly to Bob that he considered him insane, but Homer Dunstan had pledged him the thirty-nine thousand dollars when he could come to him with the notification from the Registrar of the State Land Office that the lands had been passed to patent, and Bob knew that Dunstan would keep his word, provided his death did not occur prior to the granting of the patents.

The rough draft of the contract having been drawn up to his satisfaction, Bob sallied forth in search of a public stenographer. He knew that he had evolved rather a clever scheme, and he was averse to permitting the details of his plan to fall under the comprehending eye of some boss printer, whose enterprise might perchance soar beyond the boundaries of his vocation. So Bob sought, instead, a public stenographer and had his copy multigraphed by a young lady whose interest could never, by any possibility, center in anything more than her fee.

The job was delivered two days later, and with the knowledge that he had thirty days in which to make the acquaintance of his fifty prospective clients, Bob resolved to devote one more week to the problem of still further recruiting his shattered vitality before getting down to active work.

He spent that week wandering through Golden Gate Park, along the romantic and picturesque San Francisco water-front, and in moving-picture shows. Each morning, before starting for the day's wanderings, he wrote a long letter to Donna and then waited for the first mail delivery for her letter to him. Those letters came with unfailing regularity, and in that city where Bob McGraw prowled through the day, unknown and unnoticed, there was no man so free from the curse of loneliness as he. The very opening line in Donna's matutinal greeting—“My Dear Sweetheart”—routed the blue devils that camped nightly on his worried and harassed soul, as he lay abed and wrestled with the mighty problems that confronted him. To Bob McGraw those three words held the open-sesame of life; they gave him strength to cling to his high, resolve; they whispered to him of the prize of the conflict which awaited him at the end of his long road to Donnaville, and sent him forth to face the world with a smile on his dauntless face and a lilt in his great kind heart.

Time glided by on weary wings, but eventually the day arrived for Bob to open his campaign. He must clear for action. It was imperative that he must have his fifty applications filled out and the signatures of his clients attested before a notary public on the very date upon which the desert of Owens river valley would be opened for entry, for to have them dated the day before would nullify them—to arrive with them at the land office the day after would be too late. Bob was obsessed with a suspicion that amounted almost to a conviction that the land ring would endeavor to acquire the desert valley by practically the same method which he was pursuing, only for every section of lieu land upon which they filed, they would be enabled to show a corresponding loss of school lands. His line of reasoning had convinced him that they had caused dummy entrymen to file on worthless lands in some other part of the state, in order that these bases might appear of record in the land office as already used, in case of an investigation; he was equally convinced that these dummy applications had never been acted upon in the land office, but were being held up there until the land ring was ready to act, when their dummy entrymen would abandon their filings on the worthless land, thus throwing the original basis open for use once more and permitting the land ring to step in with other dummy entrymen and use the basis for the acquisition of valuable lands. It was absurdly simple when one understood it and took the time to reason it out.

Of one thing Bob was morally certain. The representative of the land ring would be on hand, bright and early, to file the dummy applications. Bob decided, therefore, that the field of his operations until that eventful day must be confined to the state capital, Sacramento, where the state land office was located. He must recruit his little army of applicants from the capital itself, attest their applications before a notary public after midnight of the day preceding the opening of the valley for entry, and be first at the filing window when the land office opened.

Accordingly Bob proceeded to Sacramento. Immediately upon his arrival he rented a cheap back office, a desk and some chairs, and for the time being announced himself to the world, through the medium of a modest sign on his office door, as The Desert Development Company. The following day he set to work.