The Man on Horseback/Chapter 6
CHAPTER VI
GETTING ON
"Old Man" Truex's conditions were the acme of guileless simplicity.
All he wanted was to be left alone; for as he repeated over and over again with senile persistency, he was scared of the Yankee Doodle Glory and "he didn't want nothing more to do with it."
At first he was all for accepting a small cash remuneration for his past services, and he wanted to give to Tom the entire stock of the company, which in the meantime had been incorporated, free of charge.
"Take it," he said; "there ain't any strings attached."
But finally he was persuaded to accept one-half of the net profits every month as his share, leaving control of the property in Tom Graves hands.
"Now are you satisfied?" he asked.
"Not yet," said Martin Wedekind, "for what's going to become of your half of the profits in case of your death?"
Truex glared at him through his bushy eyebrows.
"I ain't goin' to kick the bucket for a long while yet!" he growled.
"Sure. Let's hope so. But suppose you …"
"Well, if I die, let Tom keep the whole lot."
"Haven't you got any relatives, any family, old-timer?" suggested the latter.
"No." Then, suddenly, as if remembering something forgotten these many years: "Wait. By the Immortal and Solemnly Attested Heck! I had a sister once, back in York State where I was raised. Silly little goose! Ran away with some measly, fiddle-scratchin', long-haired foreigner, and I ain't ever heard of her nor seen her since. Maybe she had a kid."
"What's her name?" inquired Tom.
"Sally. Sally Truex."
"I mean her married name?"
"Can't think of it, pardner. Makes no difference, though. I tell you what. If I die you just keep what's due me and hand it over to Sally or Sally's kids if they show up, see? Here!" He scrawled a few rude words on a piece of paper and handed it to Wedekind. "I guess that's good enough, ain't it?"
Wedekind read.
"It's going to be bomb-proof in a jiff," he said, and he sent the Club steward for Alec Wynn, the lawyer, who was in the next room playing life pool.
Wynn came in a few seconds later, and Truex's will, for it was no less, was duly and legally attested, witnessed, and sealed.
"Shall I put it in my safe for you?" asked the lawyer.
"I guess so," replied Truex, and Wynn left to finish his interrupted game.
Truex sighed like a man who had successfully accomplished a herculean task. "Well, there we are all cocked and primed! An as to my share of the boodle you just pay it in every month at the Old National Bank. I've a bit of an account there, an' they'll send me whatever I need when I write to em."
"Aren't you going to settle down, now you are wealthy?" asked Tom.
"Me? God, no! I'm going to British Columbia up the Elk River a-ways. A fellow told me last night there's a splotch of sure-enough quartz land up yonder an' I want to have a dig at it."
And so the old prospector packed his telescope grip and was off to the border on the next Spokane & Northern train, leaving Tom Graves entirely in control of the Yankee Doodle Glory.
Given Newson Garrett's report and Wedekind's loyal help, he had little trouble in raising money for the initial development work, and Gamble, the young Pennsylvania engineer whom Wedekind had recommended, went into the task with such speed, zest and efficiency that within a few weeks even the most doubting Thomas on the local mining stock exchange, which met every forenoon in a room of the Hotel Spokane appropriately and conveniently next to the bar room, became convinced that the ore strike in the Yankee Doodle Glory was not an elaborate hoax, with a bait for suckers attached. Consequently there was many a man who groaned at the remembrance that once he had been the possessor of the prospect and that he had been in a hurry to pass it on to the next greenhorn.
Contrary to the accepted and time-honored traditions of Northwestern mining men who have made their fortunes unexpectedly and over night, who come to town on a roaring, tearing celebration, who strike the more unchecked components of local society with the strength and enthusiasm of a flying blast and gather around them a festive crowd of both sexes primed with exuberance and thirst and expectation, Tom Graves leaned instinctively towards the more sober, the more conservative set of which Martin Wedekind was the accepted leader.
Not that he was a prig. He was what is known as a "regular fellow" in want of a better, or worse, word. Good-humored, good-natured, easy-going, generous, he had the gift of spreading about him a wave of happiness and joy.
So it was not altogether because of his rapidly growing bank account in the Old National that he was elected a member of the Club and invited to the best houses, both of proud Seventh Avenue and the more humble North side—the eternal North side of every Western town.
Of course mothers, mothers with daughters of marriageable age, that is, are the same the world over, and since Tom Graves was clean and straight and decent besides being well-to-do, the coming Spokane season was destined to witness a tug of war with Tom as the matrimonial prize; Mrs. Ryan clucking triumphantly when Tom danced the first one-step with Virginia Ryan, Mrs. Plournoy marking down a trick in her favor when the young Westerner led her daughter Cecily to the supper table.
But Tom was blind to all this byplay.
His heart was entirely taken up with Bertha Wedekind.
Dearer she was to him than the dwelling of kings, and, although even in his range days he had always been slightly dandyish, it was for her rather than for himself that gradually he abandoned the more pronounced horse-wrangling mode of dress and appeared in the streets, the restaurants, and the salons of Spokane in the garb of effete civilization—with a few notable exceptions. For he still remained faithful to his floppy, leather-encircled, alkali-stained stetson. He still refused resolutely to wear either vest or gloves. He still found it impossible to get rid of his straddling, side-wheeling walk, the memory of saddle and bit and dancing cayuse bred to the range game.
Meanwhile, the unknown ingredient of the Yankee Doodle Glory had become the scientific sensation of the hour.
Many a learned body, many a mining school, from Columbia to Denver, either asked for ore samples or sent trained men to make a personal examination of the mine in the Hoodoos.
But nobody was able to discover the nature of the foreign ingredient, not even Conrad Sturtzel, the German chemist in New York, to whom Garrett had appealed and who had an international reputation.
Newson Garrett, though, had been right when he had told Tom that the presence of the unknown metal would not interfere with the mine itself. The under ground work progressed speedily and well. The ore smelted without the slightest trouble, and though the miners at first complained of the same sensations, like an echo far-off that had scared "Old Man" Truex away from the Hoodoos and into the uncharted wilds of the Elk River district, they had no lasting ill consequences, no consequences of any sort for that matter.
"It's simply as if you were sand-hogging in a tunnel below a river bed," said Gamble, the engineer, and even that Conrad Sturtzel explained by a lengthy article in the American Ore Age in which he proved, very scientifically and long-windedly, that tunnels laid at a certain pitch acted as reservoirs for tone waves and that the foreign ingredient had of course nothing whatever to do with the curious sensation; an opinion which, since it was signed with Sturtzel's name, was accepted by the scientific and mining world.
Thus the double marvel, the financial one of Tom's sudden rise to fortune and the scientific one of the unknown metal, passed into the limbo of familiar things when—it was late in May of the year Nineteen Hundred and Thirteen, over fourteen months before the outbreak of the gigantic Prussian Crime—a new sensation electrified Spokane society.
For Bertha Wedekind remarked, quite casually, at the occasion of a supper dance given by her chum, Virginia Ryan, that a friend of hers from Berlin was coming to Spokane in a few days.
Virginia smiled superciliously. She had met a number of Germans and made no secret of the fact that she considered them very worthy, very respectable, and frightfully bad form.
"Oh—we'll try and be nice to him," she said.
Bertha smiled triumphantly.
"You won't have to try so very hard," she retorted. "You see, my friend is an officer in a crack regiment, my Uncle Heinrich's regiment. His name is Baron Horst von Gotz-Wrede, and you should see him in his uniform—blue and silver! Perfectly gorgeous, my dear!"
Virginia collapsed while Tom, who sat next to Bertha, felt something tug at his heart-strings.
It was later in the evening, as he helped Mrs. Wedekind on with her coat, that the kindly old New England woman put her thin, wrinkled hands on his shoulders and said, with that sudden abruptness of hers, that he needn't worry. "Young girls will be young girls. But—they get over it!"
Tom was taken aback.
"Then you … You know …?" He stammered.
"Of course. I am a mother, and I have eyes in my head," she smiled, "though I do wear spectacles."
"But …"
"Tom dear," said Mrs. Wedekind, "you are a nice boy. I'd love dearly to have you for a son. …"
"Or a son-in-law?" laughed Tom, with a return of his old, happy humor.
"Yes, Boy dear. But you must go in and win her by yourself. Bertha is stubborn."
"I'm stubborn myself," rejoined Tom Graves; and he bent abruptly and kissed the old lady on the cheek.