“That’s right—if he’d been able to hold on, there would have been millions, what with the power company, the timber, the railroad, and the land. That’s why the S. P. people wanted it! They waited, and when the panic came on, they began squeezing him. I saw him in New York a few days ago. I suppose he was trying to get money from some of those big Jew bankers where he’d got it before. But it isn’t the right time to pass the hat in Wall Street just now.”
The talk ran on desultorily about “the S. P. crowd,” who it seemed were the financial dictators of the Pacific Coast and “the nerve of the Dutchman who went up against that bunch.” Brainard listened closely to every word, but refrained from asking questions for fear of betraying an undue interest in Krutzmacht. As far as he could make out, with his inexperience in business affairs, Krutzmacht’s companies were valuable and solvent, but he himself was embarrassed, as many men of large enterprises were at this time, and his enemies had taken this opportune moment to get possession of his properties, using for that purpose the courts of which they seemed to have control as they had of the legislature and the governor.
“It’s a shame,” the younger stranger remarked frankly; “I expect they’ll put him through the mill and take every dollar he owns.”
“They’ll eat the hide off him all right!”
“Well, well,” the miner sighed in conclusion. “So Herb’s lost out! He’s a nervy one, though, obstinate as a mule. Wouldn’t surprise me if he crawled through somehow. I remember him years ago when he had a mine down in Arizona, a big low-grade copper proposition. That was in nineteen four, no,—three. It was another of those big schemes, too big for any one man,—a railroad and a smelter besides the mine. He claimed there was a fortune in it—and I guess it was so—only he was forced to shut down, and the next I heard of him he was out here on the Coast in this Shasta proposition.”
And that was all they had to say about Krutzmacht.
VI
“Do you know who that man is?” Brainard asked the old miner as the gentleman under bonds to return to California strolled out of the smoking room.
“Why, that’s Eddie Hollinger.”
“And who is Mr. Hollinger?”