To Vicky it seemed that all Mollie’s troubles would now melt in the warm sunshine of happiness. She could not understand the reason for the tremulous mist of tears in her sister’s soft eyes while she made the responses. After the ceremony she flung herself into Mollie’s arms and kissed her rapturously.
“I always wanted a sure enough prince for you, Mollie,” she whispered. “And now you’ve got him. Don’t you dare not to be happy now.”
Mollie nodded, swallowing a lump in her throat. She did not know whether happiness was to be her portion or not. All she was sure of was that she could walk through life beside the man she loved. And that, just now, was all she asked.
CHAPTER XV
HUGH LEARNS OLD GRIMES IS STILL DEAD
Fortune picks her favourites strangely. While the McClintocks were away at the war Robert Dodson, incompetent and worthless, developed from a pauper to a millionaire. His was one of the sudden shifts of luck to which Virginia City was becoming used.
Most men in the camp had a trunkful of mining stock picked up here and there, a lot of it feet in wildcat concerns hawked about in exchange for meal tickets, boots, shirts, liquor, and other supplies. This was scattered so promiscuously that one could acquire reams of it without giving much in actual value for it. Dodson’s rise to affluence was a camp joke. It was said that he sold two bags of bones and a pile of kindling for a million dollars. What he actually did was to swap his ramshackle wagon and starving team for fifty feet in the Never Say Die, twenty-five feet in the Gambler’s Luck, twenty in the Mollie Macrae, and fifteen in the Road to China. He was given a quart of whisky to boot. The trade was made while Dodson was drunk, and all his saloon cronies chuckled over the way he had been sold. For all of these were stock jobbing enterprises and nothing more. None of them were doing any developing at all.
A mine adjacent to the Never Say Die and the Gambler’s Luck struck it rich. There was a sympathetic boom in mines of surrounding territory. The Never Say Die sank a shaft and ran a crosscut. This cut into a vein that appeared to be a bonanza. Half seas over again, Dodson sold out his interest in both prospects at the height of the boom. Within a week it was known that the crosscut had run into only a small pocket.
Luck pursued Dodson. It would not let him alone. He took a flyer in Ophir stock, and the Ophir soared. He invested in Crown Point and the Belcher. Both were big winners.
Presently a younger brother of the new magnate appeared on the scene to manage his interests. Ralph Dodson was a big athletic fellow with glossy black hair and small black moustache. The dark eyes were keen and cold. They roved a good deal, but it was noticeable that they came to pause whenever they fell on a good-looking woman. He had a hail-fellow-well-met manner, but there was something hard and icy in him that frustrated his jollity.