Bill Wilder smiled in an abstracted, wry sort of fashion as he strode down the boarded sidewalk, which was no more than sufficient for its original purpose of saving pedestrians from wallowing in the mire and stagnant water of the unmade main throughfare of Placer City.
He was on his way to his office from his house. His house was built well beyond the tattered city’s limits with a view to escape from the sordid atmosphere of the northern gold city, which in the long years of acquaintance he had learned to detest.
Bill Wilder was the wealthiest gold man in a city of extreme wealth. Ten years of abounding success had transformed a youth of barely eighteen, lean, large, angular, yearning with every wholesome human desire, into a man of twenty-eight, glutted and overburdened with a fortune and mining interests the extent of which even he found it well nigh impossible to estimate. In ten years, under the driving force of inflexible resolve, backed by amazing good fortune, he had achieved at an age when the generality of men are only approaching the threshold of affairs that really matter.
But somehow his success had brought him little enough joy. It had brought him labour that was incessant. It had made it possible that every whim of his could be satisfied by the stroke of the pen. But instead of satisfaction, he reminded himself that somehow his life had become completely and utterly empty, and he yearned to set the clock back to those long, arduous, struggling days, when hope and resolve had been able to drive him to greater and greater exertions, with a pocket-book that was almost as lean and hungry as his stomach.
His smile now was inspired by the memory of a brief interview he had just had on his way down, in the hall of the McKinley Hotel, with a Hebrew acquaintance, a wealthy and influential saloon-proprietor. A. Feldman had spent half-an-hour in endeavouring to get him to join forces in the erection of a new dance hall that was intended to eclipse anything of the kind in the country in size, splendour, and profits. His reply had been curt. It had been harsh in its bitter condemnation. And the memory of the Jew’s hopeless stare of amazement was with him now.
“Not on your life, Feldman,” he had said in conclusion. “I’m a gold man. No better and no worse. I’m not a brothel keeper.”
His smile passed, and he gazed about him at the moving traffic surging along the miserable highway under the dazzling sunlight of a perfect spring day. He had no particular claim to good looks. His face was strong, and his expression open. There was a certain angularity about his clean-shaven features, and a simple directness in his clear-gazing grey eyes. He looked a typical gold man without pretence or display, and from the careless roughness of his tweed clothing no one would have taken him for a man who counted his wealth in millions of dollars.
But that was the man. Achievement was the sole purpose of his life. And it must be the achievement of a great body and muscles rather than the subtle scheming of the acute commercial mind which he by no means lacked.
The life of this mushroom northern city only stirred him to repugnance. He was no prude. He had tasted of the life in the fevered moments of youth. But he knew, he had strong reason to know, there was nothing in it that money could not buy, from the governing corporation to the women and gunmen who haunted the dance halls, except the Mounted Police detachment. And somehow the knowledge had become completely hateful to him.
He had migrated to the place during one of its early “rushes,” when it was only a few degrees removed from a mining camp. A whirlwind rush of humanity had swept down upon it bearing him on its tide. And he had remained to witness its leaping development into an established city of wealth and wanton freedom. Later he had participated in an attempt at real government by the saner element of its people, and the making safe of life and property. With them he had hoped. He had looked on at the mushroom growth of great hotels and offices, and greater and more elaborate halls of public entertainment. Then, with those others, he had watched the wreckage of the new authority under pressure of vested interests, and witnessed the passing of the moment or moral uplift. The falling back into a mire of corruption had been literally headlong.