The Treasure of Hidden Valley. Emerson Willis George

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      Then had come the most painful episode of the whole visit – the parting from Aunt Lois, the woman of gentle ways and kindly heart who had always loved him like a mother, who loved him still, and who tearfully pleaded with him to submit even at this eleventh hour to his uncle’s will and come back to his room in the old home. But the adieus had been spoken, resolutely though tenderly, and now Whitley Adams in his big motor car had whisked Roderick and his belongings back to the railway depot.

      He had barely time to check his trunk to Burlington and swing onto the moving train. “So long,” he shouted to his friend. “Good luck,” responded Whitley as he waved farewell. And Roderick Warfield was being borne out into the big new world of venture and endeavor.

      Would he succeed in cuffing the ears of chance and conquer, or would heartless fate play football with him and make him indeed the “pig-skin” as his uncle had prophesied in the coming events of his destiny – a destiny that was carrying him away among strangers and to unfamiliar scenes? As the train rushed along his mind was full of his father’s letter and his blood tingled with excitement over the secret that had come to him from the darkness of the very grave. The primal man within him was crying out with mad impatience to be in the thick of the fierce struggle for the golden spoil.

      A witchery was thrumming in his heart – the witchery of the West; and instead of struggling against the impulse, he was actually encouraging it to lead him blindly on toward an unsolved mystery of the hills. He was lifted up into the heights, his soul filled with exalted thoughts and hopes.

      Then came whisperings in a softer strain – gentle whisperings that brought with them memories of happy college days and the name of Stella Rain. It was perhaps nothing more nor less than the crude brutality with which his uncle had pressed his meretricious matrimonial scheme that caused Roderick now to think so longingly and so fondly of the charming little “college widow” who had been the object of his youthful aspirations.

      All at once he came to a resolution. Yes; he would spend at least one day on the old campus grounds at Knox College. The call of the hills was singing in his heart, the luring irresistible call. But before responding to it he would once again press the hand and peep into the eyes of Stella Rain.

      CHAPTER III – FINANCIAL WOLVES

      ON the very day following Roderick Warfield’s departure from Keokuk there appeared in one of the morning newspapers an item of intelligence that greatly surprised and shocked the banker, Allen Miller. It announced the death of the wife of his old friend General John Holden, of Quincy, Illinois, and with the ghoulish instincts of latter-day journalism laid bare a story of financial disaster that had, at least indirectly, led to the lady’s lamented demise. It set forth how some years before the General had invested practically the whole of his fortune in a western smelter company, how the minority stockholders had been frozen out by a gang of financial sharps in Pennsylvania, and how Mrs. Holden’s already enfeebled health had been unable to withstand the blow of swift and sudden family ruin. The General, however, was bearing his sad bereavement and his monetary losses with the courage and fortitude that had characterized his military career, and had announced his intention of retiring to a lonely spot among the mountains of Wyoming where his daughter, the beautiful and accomplished Gail Holden, owned a half section of land which had been gifted to her in early infancy by an unde, a prominent business man in San Francisco. Allen Miller was sincerely grieved over the misfortunes that had so cruelly smitten a life-long friend. But what momentarily stunned him was the thought that Gail Holden was the very girl designated, in mind at least, by himself and his wife as a desirable match for Roderick. And because the latter had not at once fallen in with these matrimonial plans, there had been the bitter quarrel, the stinging words of rebuke that could never be recalled, and the departure of the young man, as he had told his aunt, to places where they would never hear of him unless and until he had made his own fortune in the world.

      As the newspaper dropped from his hands, the old banker uttered a great groan – he had sacrificed the boy, whom in his heart he had cherished, and still cherished, as a son, for a visionary scheme that had already vanished into nothingness like a fragile iridescent soap-bubble. For obviously Gail Holden, her only possessions an impoverished father and a few acres of rocky soil, was no longer eligible as the bride of a future bank president and leader in the financial world. The one crumb of consolation for Allen Miller was that he had never mentioned her name to Roderick – that when the sponge of time came to efface the quarrel the whole incident could be consigned to oblivion without any humiliating admission on his side. For financial foresight was the very essence of his faith in himself, his hold over Roderick, and his reputation in the business world.

      The afternoon mail brought detailed news of General Holden’s speculative venture and downfall. Allen Miller’s correspondent was a lawyer friend in Quincy, who wrote in strict confidence but with a free and sharply pointed pen. It appeared that Holden’s initial investment had been on a sound basis. He had held bonds that were underlying securities on a big smelting plant in Wyoming, in the very district where his daughter’s patch of range lands was situated. It was during a visit to the little ranch that the general’s attention had been drawn to the great possibilities of a local smelter, and he had been the main one to finance the proposition and render the erection of the plant possible. At this stage a group of eastern capitalists had been attracted to the region, and there had come to be mooted a big consolidation of several companies, an electric lighting plant, an aerial tramway, a valuable producing copper mine and several other different concerns that were closely associated with the smelting enterprise.

      In the days that followed a Pennsylvanian financier with a lightning rod education, by the name of W. B. Grady had visited Holden at his Quincy home, partaken of his hospitality, and persuaded him to exchange his underlying bonds for stock in a re-organized and consolidated company.

      By reputation this man Grady was already well known to Allen Miller as one belonging to the new school of unscrupulous stock manipulators that has grown up, developed, flourished and waxed fat under the blighting influence and domination of the Well Known Oil crowd. This new school of financiers is composed of financial degenerates, where the words “honor,” “fair dealing” or the “square deal” have all been effectually expunged – marked off from their business vocabulary and by them regarded as obsolete terms. Grady was still a comparatively young man, of attractive manners and commanding presence, with the rapacity, however, of a wolf and the cunning of a fox. He stood fully six feet, and his hair, once black as a raven’s, was now streaked with premature gray which was in no way traceable to early piety. But to have mentioned his name even in a remote comparison to such a respectable bird as the raven rendered an apology due to the raven. It was more consistent with the eternal truth and fitness of things to substitute the term “vulture” – to designate him “a financial vulture,” that detestable bird of prey whose chief occupation is feasting on carrion and all things where the life has been squeezed out by the financial octopus, known as “the system.”

      It developed, according to Banker Miller’s correspondent, that no sooner had General Holden given up his underlying bonds of the smelter company and accepted stock, than foreclosure proceedings were instituted in the U. S. District Court, and the whole business closed out and sold and grabbed by Grady and a small coterie of financial pirates no better than himself. And all this was done many hundreds of miles away from the home of the unsuspecting old general, who until it was too late remained wholly ignorant and unadvised of the true character of the suave and pleasant appearing Mr. Grady whose promises were innumerable, yet whose every promise was based upon a despicable prevarication.

      And thus it was when the affairs of General Holden were fairly threshed out, that Allen Miller discovered his old friend had been the prey of a financial vampire, one skilled in sharp practice and whose artful cunning technically protected him from being arrested and convicted of looting the victim of his fortune. Holden had fallen into the hands of a highwayman as vicious as any stage robber that СКАЧАТЬ