“But this is the game of death.”
“Which makes life all the sweeter if I can beat the game. Perhaps I can better illustrate my point of view with a story. Some years ago I was sent to Arizona to examine a mining property and report upon it; if I advised its purchase, my principals were prepared to buy at my valuation. Well, when I arrived, I found a miserable shanty close to a shaft and dump, and in the shanty I found a weatherbeaten couple. The woman was probably forty but looked fifty. The man had never been anything but a hard-rock miner—four dollars a day had been the limit of his earnings in any one day until he stumbled on some float, traced it up, and located the claims I was there to examine and try to buy.
“His wife had been a miner's daughter, knowing nothing but drudgery and poverty and continuing that existence after marriage. For twenty years she had been darning her husband's socks, washing his clothes, and cooking his meals. Even after they uncovered the ledge, it wasn't worth any more than the country rock to them unless they could sell it, because the man had neither the money nor the ability to develop it himself. He even lacked the ability to sell it, because it requires real ability to unload any kind of a mine for a million dollars, and real nerve on the part of the man who buys. I examined the mine, decided it was cheap at a million dollars, and so reported to my principals. They wired me to close, and so I took a sixty-day option in order to verify the title.
“Well, time passed, and one bright day I rode up to that shanty with a deed and a certified check for a million dollars in my pocket; whereupon I discovered the woman had had a change of heart and bucked over the traces. No, siree! She would not sign that there deed—and inasmuch as the claim was community property, her signature was vitally necessary. She asked me so many questions, however, as to the size of the stamp mill we would install and how many miners would be employed on the job, that finally I saw the light and tried a shot in the dark. 'My dear Mrs. Skaggs,' I said, 'if you'll sign this deed and save us all a lot of litigation over this option you and your husband have given me, I'll do something handsome. I will—on my word of honour—I'll give you the exclusive boarding-house privilege at this mine.'”
“And what did she say, Caliph?”
“She said: 'Give me the pen, Mr. Webster, and please excuse my handwriting; I'm that nervous in business matters.'”
Dolores's silvery laughter rippled through the room. “But I don't see the point,” she protested.
“We will come to it presently. I was merely explaining one person's point of view. You would not, of course, expect me to have the same point of view as Mrs. Skaggs, of Arizona.”
“Certainly not.”
“All right! Listen to this! In 1907, at the height of the boom times in Goldfield, Nevada, I was worth a million dollars. On the first day of October I could have cashed in my mining stocks for a million—and I had a lot of cash in bank, too. But I'd always worked so hard and been poor so long that my wealth didn't mean anything to me. I wanted the exclusive privilege of more slavery, and so I staked a copper prospect, which later I discovered to consist of uncounted acres of country rock and about twenty-five dollars' worth of copper stain. In order to save a hundred dollars I did my own assessment work, drove a pick into my foot, developed blood-poison, went to the hospital, and was nice and helpless when the panic came along the middle of the month. The bank went bust, and my ready cash went with it; I couldn't give my mining stocks away. Everybody knew I was a pauper—everybody but the doctor. He persisted in regarding me as a millionaire and sent me a bill for five thousand dollars.”