“This,” and Mingote would exhibit a bit of ore, “comes from the Suspiro del Moro Mine. What a specimen! Eh? Admirable. Isn’t it? Iron ... almost pure. Ninety nine and one half per cent. mineralized. This other is of calamine. Sixty eight per cent. There are half a million tons.”
When his hoax had been discovered, not only was he unperturbed, but he would burst into laughter.
The baroness greeted Mingote’s projects with loud guffaws.
“But if you haven’t any mines, how are you going to sell them?” she would ask.
“Ah, that doesn’t matter. I invent them. It’s the same thing. As soon as we have put this thing through with Don Sergio we’ll go into business. We’ll lay out a mine; deposit, three or four hundred pesetas, whatever it amounts to. Then we’ll carry minerals from somewhere else to the land, and at once we issue shares: The Prosperity Company, Limited. Capital, 7,000,000 pesetas. We rent a building, put up an imposing copper sign with gilt lettering over the door and a servant in blue livery. We’ll collect on the shares, and the deal is worked.”
Did Mingote believe in his fancies? He himself could not have said for certain. The man was a stranger even to himself. There, within his soul, he harboured the notion of an adverse fate which prevented his prospering because he was an unblushing knave. As for skill, he had enough and to spare; nobody was as wily as he in receiving a creditor and sending him off unpaid; he was an expert in adulation and mendacity; yet, despite his constant lying, he was as gullible as any one else when it came to the deceptions of other rogues.
He believed in secret societies, in Free Masonry, in the H ... and all such mummery.
Amidst danger and perilous situations, despite the extraordinary cowardice of the ex-loan shark, his cleverness never abandoned him. Cracking a joke was a necessity to him, and in all probability, were he impaled, with the hangman’s rope around his neck, or on the very steps of the scaffold, all atremble with terror, he would have had to make some droll remark between the chattering of his teeth and the tremors of horror.
He would quarrel with folk about the most futile matters; in the street cars and at the theatres he would get into altercations with the conductors and ushers; he would raise his stick to the street-urchins, and treat everybody with the utmost disdain. He would make indecorous proposals to women in the very presence of their husbands or their parents, and despite all this, he very rarely received the cuffs or the cudgellings that any one else in his place would have earned.