I.
THE soft light of an April evening bathed Ardendale tenderly. In its gentle purity the pale green of the new leafage was the color of the sea. Down the quiet streets the orderly rows of horse-chestnuts and maples were beginning to put on foliage and in the gardens the lilac buds were bursting; through the black, moist earth of the flower-beds tiny snowdrops pushed their way and the spear-bladed leaves of tulips stood stiffly upright.
In the library of Mr. Thomas P. Hooper's residence on one of the most exclusive streets of Ardendale, his daughter, Miss Maisie Hooper, sat with her fiancé, Mr. J. Addison Mortimer.
"But twenty-five thousand dollars would be plenty for us to marry on, Ad," she said. "And you arc so clever that with your education you could get a good salary anywhere. I'm sure that pa would help you to a position here."
"I don't want a position." replied Mortimer. He was an exceedingly modern young man, inclined to stoutness as to person, and supercilious as to expression. A widely advertised college had thrown an education at him and some fragments of it had stuck: in common with many others he made the mistake of assuming that a degree was of intrinsic value; and he held strongly to the belief that he was a thoroughly shrewd man of the world. He continued:
"Twenty-five thousand isn't so much. I know plenty of men who have half of that a year, and they think they're poor. Of course, if we were satisfied to settle down in a little house in this back-number village and vegetate we could get along, but it won't do for me. I regard this legacy simply as a nest-egg. You watch me make it hatch a clutch of dollars. We'll live in a real town, Maisie, with a couple of autos and a yacht, and diamonds for you. I tell you I'll make some of these old fogies who salt down their coin into five per cent. farm mortgages sit up and take notice. I'll be worth a million in ten years."
"1 hope so, Ad," said Maisie admiringly. "I know how clever you are, but I don't like the idea of your going West to that mining place you spoke of. It's so far away."
"Railways and telegraph-lines have cut down the circumference of the world many times," said Mr. Mortimer with an air of superiority. "The West is the place to make money, and in the new mining-town, Galena, I will find all sorts of opportunities. Why, young Hackett told me that his father, the senator, often buys a claim for five hundred dollars and sells it for a cool hundred thousand. It's capital that's wanted. Here's how it is. Say I strike some old miner with a good property. I buy half his interest for thousand dollars. Then we form a joint stock-company with a capital of million. Of this I have five hundred thousand shares worth a dollar each. Say I sell them at fifty per cent. of their par value, there's a quarter of a million. Or, if I let them go at twenty-five per cent. even, they would bring me one hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars."
"My!" exclaimed Maisie in admiration. "Could you do it, Ad? It's an awfully big profit."
"It's the way all big money is made nowadays," said Mortimer complacently. "I'm just giving you the bare outline and putting it simply so that you can understand it. Joint stock-companies are the basis of modern finance. I've given you one example, And then I know a dozen other ways of making a killing. I won't touch anything that doesn't look like big money."
"You'll know about mines, of course," said Maisie innocently. "You studied geology, didn't you?"
"A little," admitted Mortimer modestly "But you don't need to know anything about mines to make money out of them; it's not the mining that there's money in—it's the manipulating the stock."
A week later J. Addison Mortimer took the train for the West.