Stacy picked up the pencil again, wrote "Wife and child S. D. B.," and leaned back in his chair. "Now, Barker," he said briefly, "I'm coming to dine with you tonight at 7.30 sharp. THEN we'll talk Heavy Tree Hill, wife, baby, and S. D. B. But here I'm all for business. Have you any with me?"
Barker, who was easily amused, had extracted a certain entertainment out of Stacy's memorandum, but he straightened himself with a look of eager confidence and said, "Certainly; that's just what it is-- business. Lord! Stacy, I'm ALL business now. I'm in everything.
And I bank with you, though perhaps you don't know it; it's in your Branch at Marysville. I didn't want to say anything about it to you before. But Lord! you don't suppose that I'd bank anywhere else while you are in the business--checks, dividends, and all that; but in this matter I felt you knew, old chap. I didn't want to talk to a banker nor to a bank, but to Jim Stacy, my old partner."
"Barker," said Stacy curtly, "how much money are you short of?"
At this direct question Barker's always quick color rose, but, with an equally quick smile, he said, "I don't know yet that I'm short at all."
"But I do!"
"Look here, Jim: why, I'm just overloaded with shares and stocks," said Barker, smiling.
"Not one of which you could realize on without sacrifice. Barker, three years ago you had three hundred thousand dollars put to your account at San Francisco."
"Yes," said Barker, with a quiet reminiscent laugh. "I remember I wanted to draw it out in one check to see how it would look."
"And you've drawn out all in three years, and it looks d----d bad."
"How did you know it?" asked Barker, his face beaming only with admiration of his companion's omniscience.
"How did I know it?" retorted Stacy. "I know YOU, and I know the kind of people who have unloaded to you."
"Come, Stacy," said Barker, "I've only invested in shares and stocks like everybody else, and then only on the best advice I could get: like Van Loo's, for instance,--that man who was here just now, the new manager of the Empire Ditch Company; and Carter's, my own Kitty's father. And when I was offered fifty thousand Wide West Extensions, and was hesitating over it, he told me YOU were in it too--and that was enough for me to buy it."
"Yes, but we didn't go into it at his figures."
"No," said Barker, with an eager smile, "but you SOLD at his figures, for I knew that when I found that YOU, my old partner, was in it; don't you see, I preferred to buy it through your bank, and did at 110. Of course, you wouldn't have sold it at that figure if it wasn't worth it then, and neither I nor you are to blame if it dropped the next week to 60, don't you see?"
Stacy's eyes hardened for a moment as he looked keenly into his former partner's bright gray ones, but there was no trace of irony in Barker's. On the contrary, a slight shade of sadness came over them. "No," he said reflectively, "I don't think I've ever been foolish or followed out my OWN ideas, except once, and that was extravagant, I admit. That was my idea of building a kind of refuge, you know, on the site of our old cabin, where poor miners and played-out prospectors waiting for a strike could stay without paying anything. Well, I sunk twenty thousand dollars in that, and might have lost more, only Carter--Kitty's father--persuaded me-- he's an awful clever old fellow--into turning it into a kind of branch hotel of Boomville, while using it as a hotel to take poor chaps who couldn't pay, at half prices, or quarter prices, PRIVATELY, don't you see, so as to spare their pride,--awfully pretty, wasn't it?--and make the hotel profit by it."
"Well?" said Stacy as Barker paused.
"They didn't come," said Barker.
"But," he added eagerly, "it shows that things were better than I had imagined. Only the others did not come, either."
"And you lost your twenty thousand dollars," said Stacy curtly.
"FIFTY thousand," said Barker, "for of course it had to be a larger hotel than the other. And I think that Carter wouldn't have gone into it except to save me from losing money."
"And yet made you lose fifty thousand instead of twenty. For I don't suppose HE advanced anything."
"He gave his time and experience," said Barker simply.
"I don't think it worth thirty thousand dollars," said Stacy dryly.
"But all this doesn't tell me what your business is with me to-day."
"No," said Barker, brightening up, "but it is business, you know.
Something in the old style--as between partner and partner--and that's why I came to YOU, and not to the 'banker.' And it all comes out of something that Demorest once told us; so you see it's all us three again! Well, you know, of course, that the Excelsior Ditch Company have abandoned the Bar and Heavy Tree Hill. It didn't pay."
"Yes; nor does the company pay any dividends now. You ought to know, with fifty thousand of their stock on your hands."
Barker laughed. "But listen. I found that I could buy up their whole plant and all the ditching along the Black Spur Range for ten thousand dollars."
"And Great Scott! you don't think of taking up their business?" said Stacy, aghast.
Barker laughed more heartily. "No. Not their business. But I remember that once Demorest told us, in the dear old days, that it cost nearly as much to make a water ditch as a railroad, in the way of surveying and engineering and levels, you know. And here's the plant for a railroad. Don't you see?"
"But a railroad from Black Spur to Heavy Tree Hill--what's the good of that?"
"Why, Black Spur will be in the line of the new Divide Railroad they're trying to get a bill for in the legislature."
"An infamous piece of wildcat jobbing that will never pass," said Stacy decisively.
"They said BECAUSE it was that, it would pass," said Barker simply.
"They say that Watson's Bank is in it, and is bound to get it through. And as that is a rival bank of yours, don't you see, I thought that if WE could get something real good or valuable out of it,--something that would do the Black Spur good,--it would be all right."