In the evening, of course, Lafond had the Little Nugget to take care of. The saloon had as yet no rivals. The size of the town perhaps warranted another establishment, but Lafond was a monopolist by nature.
He treated the men well, with a geniality behind which were unsounded depths of reserve. Therefore they respected him. The s.p.a.ce about the iron stove before the bar came to be the Town Hall. Matters of public importance were discussed every evening. Billy there told things he ought not to have told. The atmosphere was expansive, encouraged one to show off. After one had recounted the obvious, one was inclined in the heat of the moment to fall back on the confidential, merely for lack of something else to say. The camp to a man knew the amount of Billy"s expenditures, the number of his shafts. It heard extracts from all his letters to and from the East. It was acquainted with all his and the Company"s plans. A good many of the cooler heads felt the intrinsic injudiciousness of this; but after all there could be no traitors among them, because in the end the prosperity of every man present depended on Billy"s success.
But while the Great Snake was the main topic of conversation, and always remained ultimately the most important, its present interest, as spring drew near, became overshadowed by that of the new dance hall.
The Westerner loves to dance. A street organ sets him shuffling. He will drive twenty miles in a springless wagon and twenty miles back again in the grayness of dawn to stamp his feet to the sound of an accordion. Every camp has its organized dance joint, a sort of hall mark of its genuineness as a camp. Now with the approach of the date for formal opening this long musicless community woke up to its deprivation. All the details of the new establishment were enjoyed in antic.i.p.ation. It had a planed floor. The boards had been brought by wagon from McGuire"s mill at Hermosa. It was to be lighted by real locomotive lanterns of an impressive but meaningless number of candle power. It was to be entirely draped with flags. The musicians were to be imported from Spanish Gulch. Lafond dispensed this and similar information sparingly, in order that it might be made the most of. He promised the "opening ball" for May if possible.
"That depends, of course," he always concluded his statements, short or long.
XXVIII
LAFOND GOES EAST
About the middle of February Lafond varied the monotony of his daily programme. He ceased to visit the Great Snake camp, on which work was proceeding as rapidly as ever, and took to writing letters. He wrote a great many, and always mailed them himself with Blair, the driver of the stage. He announced one evening in the middle of March that he was about to leave for a short trip.
"I have the round to make," he said resignedly. "There are many places which each year I must visit. I go to Deadwood, Spearfish, Custer, Sheridan, Edgemont, Rapid, Buffalo Gap, many others. I may be gone a month."
"But yore comin" back, ain"t you?" asked someone.
"But yes," a.s.sured the half-breed. "Have we not the opening of the dance hall?"
So the very next morning he boarded the stage for Rapid. At Rapid he bought a return ticket to Chicago. This was one of the results of the correspondence he had been carrying on for a month past. His first letter had run about as follows:
"Mr. Frederick Stevens, Chicago.
"DEAR SIR--You will perhaps remember me as one of your hosts during your late visit to this camp. If you do, you will remember also that I am interested financially, and so the good of the camp is my good. You will further recollect that I was present at the meeting held in Knapp"s shack for the purpose of settling with him. For that reason I happen to know your plans and expectations. The expectations were that your first investment of fifty thousand dollars would complete the works to a paying basis. I have no means of knowing the exact amount of Knapp"s expenditures to now, but they must be considerable, and I feel that my interests and yours require that you know just what the returns are.
"The results you should get with your fifty thousand dollars are, that you should have, on each claim, shafts to below water level with cross-cuts and drifts, a mill set up and ready, a pump and hoist on each shaft, a month"s fuel, a month"s wages for men with food and expenses and a camp in good working order.
"The shafts are almost done, but they are sunk on contract and are not paid for yet. The mill is half up; there is one pump and two hoists not up yet. That is all that is done. It seemed to me Knapp has not spent his money well, because there is much about camp which he does not need.
"I tell you this because I am interested."
Here Black Mike paused and tapped his teeth thoughtfully with the end of his penholder. Then he smiled cynically to himself and went on--"To speak plainly, I think the waste has gone beyond what you can afford.
Only a man living here and knowing mining well could make it pay. I do not ask you to believe this, but see for yourself how you stand, and I may be able to make you an offer."
By return of post Lafond was frantically called upon to explain. He did so. Billy had been wasteful and extravagant. It was not Billy"s fault perhaps, but he was evidently not the man for the place. Lafond had had but a vague idea of how things were going, but lately he had been at more pains to gain an accurate knowledge of affairs. He had found things as above stated. He did not write at all as a friend of the Company, but because he believed he could perhaps make something by taking the property himself. Instinctively the half-breed knew that an insistence on his own selfishness was the surest way of impressing these Easterners with his sincerity. For that reason he demanded his expenses when he was asked to go East for consultation.
The Chicago men were badly frightened. Lafond repeated clearly at greater length what he had told them in his letters. It had been a case of a man unused to the handling of money. He insisted that in actual value there existed not one quarter of the sum Knapp had expended; and he further claimed that affairs were in such shape West that as much more would have to be invested before the mine could be put on a paying basis.
"Then," said he, "you have your cost of production and your camp expenses always. From your profits above them you have to make up what Knapp has spent and what you will have to spend. That takes your close attention and many years. For that I think you will not wish to go ahead; and for that I come to make you an offer that will make it for you not an entire loss. I do not ask that you believe me.
Investigate."
"Would you be willing to wait here while we investigate?" asked Murphy.
"Always, for my expenses," replied Lafond calmly.
The Easterners consulted.
"Very well," said Stevens. "Call it that."
Lafond in the little room at his hotel looked at himself closely in the gla.s.s.
"A fool for luck! a fool for luck!" he cried at the imaged reflection, repeating his old formula.
Stevens was gone just ten days. Of course he said nothing of Lafond"s presence in Chicago. He had merely dropped in to look over the property, as was natural. Most of the men wondered why he had not done so before. He was cordial to Billy, looked over what had been done, asked many questions, listened attentively to all Billy had to say and departed in the most friendly spirit. When he arrived in Chicago, he went directly to his office in the Monadnock Building, where he had already a.s.sembled his a.s.sociates by telegraph.
Stevens was brief, business-like and coldly impartial. In a man of his sort that indicated that he was very angry and chagrined.
"I have the following figures to submit," said he, taking up a paper.
"They are accurate, as I consulted with an expert as to the items of future expense before leading Rapid.
10 horses at 105.00 . . . . . . . $1,050.00 10 sets harness at 60.00 . . . . . 600.00 Mill machinery . . . . . . . . . . 6,500.00 Pumps, hoists . . . . . . . . . . 1,250.00 4 months" wages at 4.00 a day . . 4,800.00 2 1/2 months" boarding expenses . 610.00 Hay, tools, implements . . . . . . 1,165.00 Wagons, household goods . . . . . 2,560.00 Miscellaneous . . . . . . . . . . 2,112.00 Building roads . . . . . . . . . . 829.00 ---------- $21,476.00
"That is what has been spent up to date according to Knapp"s accounts."
"But hold on!" interjected Murphy; "he has drawn six drafts. That makes thirty thousand. Has he eight thousand in hand? Why did he have to draw the last draft?"
"He doesn"t know," replied Stevens grimly. "His bank balance," he declared, consulting the paper again, "is just $1,126.40. He says he doesn"t know where the balance is."
"Do you think----?"
"Not at all. He is perfectly honest. That is the way he does things."
"Here," went on Stevens after a moment, "is what remains to be done before we can even start to work. It is an estimate, but it is a close one; for, as I told you, I had a.s.sistance in making it out:
Mills, pumps, hoists . . . . . . . $12,000.00 Sheds, ore-dumps, etc . . . . . . 1,500.00 20 horses and harness . . . . . . 3,200.00 Men, etc. . . . . . . . . . . . . 5,000.00 Wagons and tools . . . . . . . . . 5,000.00 ---------- $26,700.00
That is to bring us up to the efficient working point. Now here are our liabilities:
Miscellaneous bills . . . . . . . $850.00 Contract on 1,100 feet of shaft and tunnel at 20 a foot . . . . . . . . . 22,000.00 ---------- $22,850.00
That is what we owe, gentlemen," concluded Stevens, slapping his papers on the table and looking about him. "Now if you want to throw good money after bad, you can do so," he continued after a moment; "but this is a limited liability company and I am done. I am strongly in favor of pulling out some way to save our names as promoters of such a fool enterprise, but I think we should pull out. This man Lafond thinks he can do something with the property if he has a fair show, and perhaps we can save something through him. Our fifty thousand is _gone_--and more, after we"ve paid our debt to those men--and anything we can save out of such a mess seems to me clear gain."
And so with equal haste they scrambled out.
The first inexplicable phenomenon is the sanguine blindness such men show in going into mining; the second is the headlong thoughtlessness with which they draw out. Anything to get back to daylight apparently.
Again the parallel of the b.u.t.ton-hook factory. In case of failure these men would have first looked the ground over well for possible retrenchment along the old lines of expenditure: that failing, they would have examined closely for a possible new plan. But in the present case they never even conceived the possibility of any scale of operation different from that grand vision of eleven contiguous mines all going at full blast which Billy"s vivid imagination had called into being. Lafond saw it clearly enough. Had he been so minded, he could have set the whole matter right; just as, if he had been so minded, he could have turned the trend of Billy Knapp"s extravagance with a little timely advice.
"Gentlemen," he could have said, "has it ever occurred to you to start on a small scale and work up gradually to a larger? You can mine one shaft on one claim with one cheap five-stamp mill. In that way you could at least pay expenses from the very surface. After a little you can pay more. Then you might open up another claim. That would take time to be sure; but what business does not take time?"