Sharp occupied his time in buying up superfluous real estate, which seemed to have been infected by copper, and showed a disposition to rise—and he was afraid it might go up and never come down again. The conveyancers assured him that he ought to take it—like a sportsman—on the wing, right and left. He did, and clapped a heavy mortgage on it to keep it steady.
That disturbed the figures on Flat’s memorandum—for he hoped to have bought and paid for it with his expected profit on copper, and to have staggered somebody else’s property with a mortgage from the surplus. It was provoking.
Jones and Wilkins resolved to “take a shy at the copper anyway, while it was going;” but the stock of all the companies seemed shy of them. They “bid ten dollars through a broker”—it was twelve. “Bid twelve”—it was fourteen. Wilkins had had enough of it. He believed it was “only a bubble blown up to catch the eyes of fools. He was done with it.” But Jones was down in the morning, as merry as a lark, and as early. He “knew some of the outsiders, and thought he would catch some of them before the morning was over.” He did—and went home to dinner, having made “a fortunate hit.”
“Five hundred shares,” said he, “at fifteen, and the last sale ‘after board,’ nineteen and a half! Four dollars and fifty cents per share. Five aught is naught; five fives are twenty-five, five fours are twenty, and two are twenty-two. Twenty-two hundred and fifty dollars—that will do for one day, I should say. Wilkins would like me to give him half, as we were to have gone in together yesterday, but I wonder what Wilkins ever did for me, that I should give him eleven hundred and twenty-five dollars! Not quite so green!”
The next morning Grubemout brought down some specimens, which “he thought” would yield forty per cent. if they were assayed, and thought that they ought to make an assessment of a dollar a share, so as to put on more hands and drive out the ore. Jones said that “that was right enough.”
The assessment was called in, at which the stock hesitated for a day or two—made a start and went on—but a second installment being urged, it faltered a little, and then stopped. At the third it “declined a shade,” at which the “bears” gave a shake and a growl.
But Grubemout had—in the nick of time—“just received a letter from the mines of the most important nature, which it would not do to show in ‘the street,’ or the stock would be balooning it—Uptosnuff had just made a cross-cut.”
“The deuce he has!” exclaimed Jones, rather nervously. “What is that?”
“A cross-cut, you see,” says Grubemout, “is nothing more than ‘a shaft’ run at right angles past the old one we have been working. He struck some glorious ‘deposites,’ and—”
“Why I thought you always said there was a vein, Grubemout? These deposites are confoundedly leaky and treacherous affairs.”