Читать книгу My Adventures with Your Money - George Graham Rice - Страница 22

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Arkell wrote a dispatch to the East in the presence of our newly-made friends, describing the offering. Then he and I held a consultation, and he vouchsafed the information that we would certainly get a free automobile ride to Goldfield and have a chance to see there the new boom mining camp.

I got "cold feet." Arkell's talk of visionary millions in that bleak environment of snow-clad desert and wind-swept mountain didn't enthuse me at all. I protested against the proposed trip to Goldfield, and insisted that I should be allowed to telegraph to relatives for money with which to return to the Coast.

But Arkell persisted. He declared that the expense of the trip to Goldfield and back to Tonopah would be borne by the vendors of the mines and that our return trip to San Francisco would be delayed only one day. I left my grip, umbrella and cane in Tonopah, intending to return the same evening, and boarded the automobile for Goldfield.

Arrived in Goldfield, we were escorted to the Simmerone. Arkell appeared to be very much impressed, although he remarked to me a few minutes later that he would not give $34 for the whole layout. And therein he was wise. The Simmerone was later capitalized for 1,000,000 shares, each share of a par value of $1, ballooned on the San Francisco and Goldfield stock exchanges to $1.65 a share, and then allowed to recede to nothing bid, one cent per share asked. The rich ore "petered out."

There was an indefinable something in the atmosphere of Goldfield—a new, budding mining camp, at an altitude of 5,000 feet and on the frontier—that stirred me, and I decided to stay awhile.

Arkell determined that he would go back to Tonopah and get an option on the control of a mining company known as the Tonopah Home, which Mr. Dunlap had mentioned to him in the automobile en route to Goldfield. He said he would then go to San Francisco to promote it. The reason why he decided to handle the Tonopah Home, I afterward discovered, was that it was already incorporated and stock certificates had been printed, thereby eliminating the delay and expense incident to preparing something for the immediate consumption of the San Francisco public.

"How am I going to subsist here for a few days until I can begin to make a living?" I asked Arkell.

"How am I going to get back to Tonopah and from there to San Francisco?" Arkell asked me.

At that moment we stood in front of the Goldfield Bank and Trust Company's building—a tin bank literally as well as figuratively. It was constructed of corrugated iron and tin. A few months later, when the bank went up the flume, the cash balance found in the safe aggregated 80 cents.

"You take me into this bank and introduce me and I will cash a check," he said.

"A check on what?" I asked.

"On my bank in Canajoharie, New York," he said. "I was born and brought up there, and they wouldn't let one of my checks go to protest. Besides, I can get back to 'Frisco and protect it by telegraph, if necessary, before it reaches Canajoharie."

We entered the bank. I introduced myself to the cashier as an Eastern newspaper man, and then introduced W. J. Arkell as the former publisher of Leslie's Weekly, Judge, and so on.

After a brief parley, Arkell exchanged his paper for real money to the amount of $50. On leaving the bank, I said:

"Now, Bill, come across! I'm flat broke, on the desert."

He handed me $15. I was satisfied, because he needed all of the $35 to get back to civilization.