“Well, old man!––I never had a little sister. If I had had, I fancy I wouldn’t be here to-day. So that’s how it goes. But we have a good year ahead of us to buy and sell and loan for a fare-you-well; to make a stake as big as all the others have made together in the last three or four years. And we are going to do it, too. I feel it in the air.
“I don’t know what will happen after that––some of the big fellows, Royce Pederstone, Brenchfield and Arbuthnot are overloaded now, but they keep on mortgaging and buying more. The newer ranchers here have 342 planted their orchards and are sitting still for the ‘seven lean years’ till their orchards begin to bear, instead of getting busy with truck stuff, poultry and pigs to keep them going. Some of them are feeling the pinch already, for it costs like the devil to live here––especially the way these fellows insist on living. They also are mortgaging heavily. Man, if any kind of a slump came in realty, or a shortage of money, and the banks shut down and the money-lenders started to draw in their capital, there would be a veritable stampede.
“I give it a year, boy; then, if we’ve got the money, that’s the time to put it in, for, a few years more and all these baby orchards about the Valley will be paying for themselves over and over again.
“Half of the ranchers in the meantime are going to get cold feet, because they won’t be able to get their stuff to the paying markets, while, if they only organised––as they undoubtedly will do later––they could get their fruit anywhere and at a big price, too.
“But––that’s where we can get in.”
And as Jim went off, Phil sat for a while thinking––a dreamer and a visionary––until he was jolted out of his reverie by the pressing inquiries of his recently augmented staff.
One day the inevitable, according to Jim’s notion of things, happened. A letter arrived, bearing the heading of Langford & Macdonald, Solicitors and Attorneys, Princes Street, Edinburgh, making inquiry as to the possibility of placing trust funds on gild-edged first mortgage security, requesting bank references and inviting correspondence from the Langford-Ralston Financial Corporation.
The letter was straight business. There were no paternal greetings; not a word to suggest that either Langford had ever known of the other’s existence.
Jim, with his usual long-headedness, insisted on Phil replying to it and signing it on behalf of the firm.