"I have," says J. Bayard, smilin' confident. "Peculiar case too. A month or so ago I should have been puzzled. Now it seems very simple. I've done all my investigating, made my plans, and if you will run downtown to a lawyer's office with me after luncheon we shall meet the beneficiaries-to-be and fix up the details of a nice little deed of kindness of which I am the proud author."
"Fat commission in it for you, eh?" says I.
J. Bayard looks pained and hurt. "Really," says he, "I hadn't thought of that. No, the outlay will be slight. In fact, it's merely a matter of launching a young man in society."
"Well, well!" says I. "That's a husky job for a couple of grown men like us, ain't it? Who's the young gent—Clarence what?"
"Ever hear of Hungry Jim Hammond?" says he.
I had, but couldn't quite place him; so J. Bayard supplies the description. He'd started out as a railroad man, Hammond had, back in the days when Pyramid Gordon was first beginnin' to discover that swappin' hot air for votin' shares was perfectly good business so long as you could get away with the goods. Only Hammond was the real thing. He was a construction expert.
Mr. Gordon had found him on the payroll of a line he'd annexed by a midnight deal; concluded he knew too much about the job to be a safe man to have around; so he transfers him to the Far West and sets him to work on a scheme to lay out a road parallelin' the Southern Pacific. Hammond couldn't tell it was a stall. He blazes merrily ahead surveyin' a right of way across three States, and had got as far as Death Valley when the rumor comes to camp that this new line is all a fake.
Hammond had a gang of twenty-five or thirty men with him, and his weekly pay check hadn't shown up for about a month. But he couldn't believe that Pyramid had laid down on him. He'd got mighty int'rested in buildin' that road across the desert, and had dreamed some rosy dreams about it. But his men felt diff'rent. They wanted action on the cashier's part, or they'd quit. Hammond begged 'em to stay. He even blew in his own bank account settlin' part of the back wages. But inside of three days his crew had dwindled to a Chinese cook and a Greaser mule driver. Took him a couple of weeks more to get wise to the fact that he was stranded there in the sand, six miles from a water hole, with a few cases of canned beef and a sack of corn meal.
Even then he didn't give up for good. He made his way back to a stage station and sent through a wire to Pyramid askin' for instructions. More than a month he waited, with no word from Gordon. Seems that by then Pyramid was too busy with other things. He'd cashed in on his bluff and was sortin' a new hand. And maybe he wa'n't anxious to have Hammond come East again. Anyway, he let him shift.
That was when Hammond came so near starvin'. But he didn't—quite. For a year or more he managed to live somehow. Then one day he drove a team of boneyard mules into Blue Dog with a wagonload of stuff that the natives stared at. It was white, shiny stuff. Hammond said it was borax. He'd discovered a big deposit of it out there in the blisterin' sand. He was goin' to ship it back East and sell it. They thought he was nutty. He wasn't, though. On East they was usin' a lot of borax and demandin' more.