Читать книгу My Adventures with Your Money - George Graham Rice - Страница 19

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"Jack Hornaday" discontinued business.

I began to like San Francisco and the Coast. Being thrown among Arkell's associates in the Palace Hotel lobby, from time to time I naturally heard a great deal of talk about the new Nevada mining camp of Tonopah.

"Rice," said Arkell one evening, "come with me up to Tonopah and be my press agent. We will get hold of a mining property up there, promote a company and make a barrel of money."

"What do you know about mines?" I asked.

"Well, I've lost enough in 'em to know a great deal," he answered.

"I don't know a mine from a hole in the ground, and I know nothing about the stock-brokerage business; so I don't see how I can be of any assistance," I said.

"Don't let that bother you," he replied. "I'll show you how. You come with me."

"I will go on one condition," I said. "I am in for half on anything you do."

We shook hands and it was a bargain.

We went to the depot. I had a trifle less than $150 in my pocket. Arkell had $75.

"Suppose we get stranded out there, what will happen?" I propounded.

"Oh, forget it!" he answered. "How can a couple of Easterners like us, wide awake and with phosphorus brains, get stranded in a place where they dig silver and gold out of the ground?"

We journeyed to Tonopah—a thirty-six-hour ride. The altitude is 6,000 feet, and it was cold, nasty, penetrating Winter weather. During the last hundred miles of our journey across the mountainous desert we looked out of the car window and saw trainload after trainload of what was said to be ore coming from the opposite direction, and we decided that Tonopah was a sure-enough mining camp and that some of the sensational stories about bonanza mines that we had heard were really true.