Читать книгу My Adventures with Your Money - George Graham Rice - Страница 20

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Arriving In Tonopah after dusk, we sought hotel accommodations. The best we could get was a bed in a forbidding looking one-story annex, walled with undressed pine and roofed with tarpaulin. It was located 100 feet to the rear of the hotel, which was already crowded with miners and soldiers of fortune drawn from all quarters of the world by the mining excitement. Its aspect was so inhospitable that Arkell and I decided not to retire for a little while. We gravitated out toward the barroom, where the click of the roulette wheel caught our ears.

We sat down to watch the game. Soon we were buying stacks of checks and ourselves bucking the tiger excitedly. In an hour the remnants of my $150 passed to the ownership of the man behind the game, and Arkell had put his last two-bit piece on the black and lost.

I looked at him. He looked at me.

"Umph!" he grunted. "Better hit the feathers!"

Meekly I followed him to the annex. When we got under the soiled gray woolen blankets, I remarked: "I've got a cane and an umbrella and three suits of clothes. Do you think we can sell them in the morning for enough to provide breakfast money?"

"Oh, come off!" exclaimed my partner. "Wait till I present my card around this burg in the morning; then we will get all the breakfast we want."

We awoke hungry, as all men have a habit of doing when they are broke.

"I am going over to the Montana-Tonopah Mining Company's office," said Arkell. "A mining engineer by the name of Malcolm Macdonald makes his headquarters over there and he wants to sell some mining properties at Goldfield and in other parts of the State for about three million dollars."

"Three millions!" I exclaimed.

"Yes," said Arkell. "I'll get the facts and wire them to my friend Joe Hoadley in New York."

"Say, Bill," I remonstrated, "they have a privately-owned jerkline telegraph in this town, and if you send any 'phony' telegrams over the wire, they'll be on to you. So don't do any of that kind of business."

"Nothing of the kind!" replied he promptly. "Any message I send to Hoadley he'll answer."

"I guess you have it fixed on the other end," I remarked. He laughed.

We strolled over to the State Bank and Trust Company building, across the street, and there met Malcolm Macdonald, a mining engineer from Butte, Montana, and his friend, Mr. Dunlap, who was at the time secretary of the Montana-Tonopah Mining Company. The conversation was not more than five minutes old when Arkell suggested that he would like to eat breakfast, but "didn't want any restaurants in his," intimating that he would like to have some good, old-fashioned home cooking. Mr. Dunlap remarked modestly that the camp was too young to boast of much home cooking, but that if we would be his guests he would guarantee to make arrangements for some special cooking at the Palace restaurant.