The San Francisco Call. Newspaper, July 12, 1903, Page 1

TH!S is the First Install- ment of- “The Spenders,” by Harry Leon Wilson, with the original illustration of O’Neil Latham, the famous New York Artist. In securing this book, which has universally been described as “the great American novel,” The Sunday Call created s veritable journalistic trinmph, for there has mever been written = book which deals with modern life in both the East and the West in such a strong, terse, thrilling manner as “The Spenders” does. It bhas been aptly Sescribed as & “movel of mew method,” per- baps more because it reveals, in an absolutely unigue way, why Amer- fem is the great money-making ma- tion of the earth, tham for the fas- ting love them. T t pervades "The Spenders” in this form usly popular. of the best features day Oall’s literary policy. u mot enly get the very latest novels by the most famous writers in the world, but you get them quick. There mre mot long waits between installments and mo imter- ries of “Continued in our it will be trem Francis Lyanj John Fox Jr.; “The Twe Vanrevels,” by Beoth Tarkingtom, whose famous novel, “The Geatleman (rom Indi- ana,” has just been comcluded im these pages; “The Turnpike House,” by Fergus Hume, etc., ete. Copyright, 1902, by Lothrop Publishing O All rights reserved. CHAPTER 1. a THE SECOND ERATION IS RE- MOVED. HEN Daniel J. Bines died of spoplexy In his private car at Kaslo Junction no one knew just where to reach either his father or his young son of his death. Somewhere slope of the Sierras the old leading, as be bad long each summer, the lonely ospector. The young man, Harvard and but recent- n extended European tour, int on the North Atlantie g the season’s pursuit of as he listed. 3 & land so young that almost the ent dwellers therein bave made It £ht we find individualities which so de- e falled to blend. So littls con~ was the family of Bines in root, and blossom that it might, in- be taken to picture an eplc of West. ife as the romancer would tell it t of the line stands the figures of ter es, the pioneer, g days of Fremont, of Kit ney and Bridger, the fear- vers toward an ever-receding fascinating for its untried dangers ts fabled wealth—the sturdy, grave o fought and tolled and hoped, zed in varying measure, but who h a life such as the col- eller shall ever be high ugh to reproduce. Next came Daniel J. Bl & type of the bullder and organizer who followed the trail blazed by the pioneer; the genius finding the magic realm opened, forthwith became Iits exploiter to its vast renown and his own large profit, colning wealth of minerals, lumber, cattle and ain, and sdventurously building the raliroads that must always be had to drein & new land of savagery. Nor would there be wanting a third—a figure of this present day, containing in potency &t least the stanch qualities of his two rugged forbears—the venturesome epirit that set his restiess grandsire to roving westward, the power to group and co-ordinate, to “think three moves ahead,” which had made his father a man of affairs: and, further, he had something modern of his own t neither of the others possessed, and yet which came as the just fruit of the parent vine; a dispo- sition perhaps & bit less strenuous, turn- ing back to the risen rather than forward to the setting sun; a tendency to rest & little from the tofl end tumuit; to culti- vate some graces subtier than those of adventure and commercialism; to make the most of what had been done rather then strain to the doing of needless more; to live, in short, like & philosopher and & gentleman who has more golden doliars & year then either philosophers or gentle- al figure had gone suddenly, at the age of 52, after the way of certain men who are q k, ardent and generous in thelr 1ivi rom his luxu- private car, Iving on the side track ttle station, Toler, pri- a tel- rs of one im- the death of its s mining, mil'ing smbering companies the death of president, vice president or man- r, as the case might be. For only daughter word of the had gome to a mountain resort om the family home at Montana s the here promised to be delzay In reaching the other two. The son would early read the news, Toler decided, unless percha he were off at sea, since the death of a Bines would be told by every per.in the country. He tel wever, to the young man's rk apartments and to a Newport n the chance of finding him. sid Peter Bines at this season r was a feat never hightly to be nor for any trivial end. It e 10th of June, it could be h certainty only that in one of was prowling through on, toiling over a windy mountain sheerly, in best loved sport of pros- 1g his babits, the rashest ot "have atternpted to say here the old man might The most devise was to promising plan Toler could wire the superintendent of the One Girl mine at Skiplap. The elder Bines, he knew, had passed through Skip- lap &bout June 1 and had left, perhaps, some inkling of his proposed route; if it chanced, indeed, that he had taken the trouble to propose one, Parigburn, the mine superintendent, on receipt the news, dispatched five men on the search in as many different direc- tions. The oM man was mow 74, and Pangburn had noted when last they met that be appeared to be somewhat less and vigorous than he had been years before; from which it was fair to reason that he might be playing his solitary game at a lelsurely pace, and i3 AT fe s would have tramped no great distance in the ten days he had been gone. The searchers, therefore, were directed to beat up the near-by country. To Billy Brue was allotted the easiest as being the most probable route. He was to follow up Paddle Creek to Four Forks, thence over the Bitter Root trail to Eden, on to Oro Fino and up over Lit- tle Pass to Hellandgone. He was to proceed slowly, to be alert for signs along the way, and to make inquiries of all he met. “You're likely to get track of Uncle Peter,” sald Pangburn, “over along the west side of Horseback Ridge, fust be- yona Eden. When he pulled out he was talking about some likely floatrock he’d picked up over that way last summer. You't-ought to make that by to-morrow, seeing you've got a good horse and the trail's been mended this spring. Now you spread yourself out, Billy, and when you get on to the Ridge make a special look all around there.” Besides the directions and the telegram from Toler, Billy Brue took with him a copy of the Skiplap Weekly Ledge, damp from the press and containing the death notice of Daniel J. Bines, a notice sent out by the News Assoclation, which Billy Brue read with interest as he started up the trail. The item concluded thus: “The young and beautiful Mrs. Bines, who had been accompanying her husband on his trip of inspection over the Sierra Northern, is prostrated with grief at the shock of his sudden death.” Billy Brue mastered this plece of in- telligence after six readings, but he re- frained from comment, beyond thanking God, in thought, that he could mind his own business under excessive provocation to do otherwiss. He considered it no med- dling, however, to remember that Mrs. Daniel J. Bines, widow of his late em- ployer, could appear ther young nor beautiful to the most sanguine of news- gatherers; nor to remember that he hap- pened to know she had not accompanied her husband on his last trip of inspection over ..e Kalso division of the Slerra Northern Railway. CHAPTER II. HOW THE FIRST GENERATION ONCE RIGHTED ITSELF. By some philosophers unhappiness is be- lieved—rather than coming from depriva- tion or infliction—to result from the indi- vidual’s fallure to select from a number of possible occupations one that would afford him entire satisfaction with life and himself. To this perverese blind- ness they attribute the dissatisfaction with great wealth traditional of men who have it. The fault, they contend, is not with wealth Inherently. The most they will admit against money is that the possession of mych of it tends to destroy that judicial calm necessary to a wise choice of recreations; to Incline the pos- sessor, perhaps, toward those that are un- salutary. Concerning the old man that Billy Brue now sought with his news of death, a philosopher of this school would unhesi- tatingly declare that he had sounded the last note of human wisdom. Far up in some mountain solitude old Peter Bines, multimillionaire, with a lone pack-mule to bear his meager outfit, picked up float- rock tapped and scanned ledges and chipped at bowlders with the same ardor that bad fired him in his penniless youth. Back in 1850, & young man of 24, he had Joined the rush to California, working his passage as deckhand on a vessel that doubled the Horn. Landing without cap- ital at San Francisco, the little seaport settlement among the shifting yellow sand-dunes, he had worsed six weeks along the docks as Toustabout for money to take him back Into the hills whence came the big fortunes and the bigger tales of fortunes. For six years he worked over the gravelly benches of tue Califor- nia creeks for vagrant particies of gold. Then, in the late fifties, he joined @ mad stampede to the Frazer River gold flelds in British Columbia. Tnence, in the sixties, the mining world being still wild over its first knowledge of silver sul- phurets, he was drawn back to the won- der tales of the Comstock lode. Joining the bedraggled caravan over the Carson trail, he continued his course of bitter hardship in the Washoe Valley. From a patch of barren sun baked rock and earth, three miles long &nd a third of a mile wide, high up on the eastern slope of Mount Davidson, he beheld more millions taken out than the wildest en- thusiast had ever before ventured to dream of. But Petet Bines was a luckless unit of the majority that had, perfo to live on the hope produced by other: findings. The time for his strike had not come. For ten years more half-clad in flannel ghirt and overalls, he lived in flimsy tents, tattered canvas houses and some- —— times holes in the ground. One abode of luxury, long cherished in memory, was a ten-by-twelve redwood shanty on Feather River. It not only boasted a window, but there was a round hole In the ‘“shake” roof, fastidlously cut to fit a stovepipe. That he never possessed a stovepipe had made this feature of the architecture not less su gaging. He lived chiefly on salt pork and beans, cooked over smoky campfires. Through it ail he was the determined, eager, confident prospector, never for an instant prey to even the suggestion of a doubt that he would not shortly be rich. Whether he washed the goiwen specks from the sand of a szge brush plain or sought the mother ledge of some wander- ing golden child, or dug with his pick to follow a promising surface lead, he knew it to be only the matter of time when his day should dawn. He was of the make that wears unbending hope as {ts birth- right. Some day the inexhaustible placer would be found; or, on a mountainside where the porphyry was stained, he would care- lessly chip off a fragment of rock, turn it up to the sun, and bchold it rich in ruby sllver; or, some day, the vein in- stead of pinching out would widen; there would be pay ore almost from the grass roots—rich, yeilow, free-milling gold, so that he could put up a little arastra, beat out enough in a week to buy a small stamp , and then, In six months— Ten years more of this fruitless but nourishing certainty were his—ten years of the awtul solitude, shared sometimes by bis bardy and equally confident wife, and, at the last, by his boy, who had be- come old enough to endure with his fath- er the snow and ice of the mountain tops g 8 e and the withering Leat of the alkall wastes. Footsore, hungry most of the time, al- ternately burned and frozen, he lived the life cheerfully and tirelessly, with an enthusiasm that never faltered. When his day came it brought no sur- prise, so freshiy certain had he kept of its coming through the twenty years of search. At _his feet, one July morning in 1870, be noticed a plece of dark stained rock in a mass of drift r'ones. So small was it that to have gone a few feet to either side would have been to miss It. He picked it up and examined it leisurely. It was rich In silver. Somewhere, then, between him and the mountain top was the paront stock from which this precious fragment had been broken. The sun beat hotly upon him as it had on other days through ail the hard years when certalnty, after all, was noth- ing more than a temperamental faith. All day he climbed and searched method- ically, stopping at noon to eat with an appetite unaffected by his prospect. At sunset he would have stopped for the day, camping on the spot. He looked abové to estimate the ground he could cover on the morrow. Almost In front of him, a few yards up the mountainside, he looked squarely at the mother of his float; a huge bowlder of projecting silicate. It was there. During the following week he ascer- tained the dimensions of his vein of sil- ver ore, and located two claims. He named them “The Stars and Stripes™ and “The American Boy,”. paying thereby what he considered tributes equally de- served to his native land and to his only son, Danlel, in whom were centered his fondest hopes. b A year of European travel had followed for the family, & year of spending the new money lavishly for strange, long- dreamed-of luxuries—a year in which the money was joyously proved to be real. Then came & year of tentative residen in the East. That year was less satis- factory. The novelty of being sufficlently fed, clad and sheltered was losing its fine edge. Pennlless and constrained to a life of privation, Peter Bines had been strangely happy. Rich and of comsequence in & community where the ways were all of pleasantness and peace, Peter Blnes be- came restless, discontented, and, at last, unmistakably miserable. “It can't be because I'm rich,™ he ar- gued; “It's a sure thing my money can't keep me from doin’ jest what I want to do.” Then a suspicion pricked him; for he had, in his years of solitude, formed the babit of considering, in @ leisurely and hospitable manner, even the reverse sidea of propositions that are commonly ac- cepted by men without question. “The money can't prevent me from doin’ what 1 jest want to—certain—but, maybe, don’t it? If I didn’t have it ra fur sure be back In the hills and happy, and so would Evalina, that ain't had hardly what you could Il a good day since we made the strike.” On this line of reasoning it took Peter Bines no long time to conclude that he ought now to enjoy as & luxury what he had once been constrained to as a ne- © ity. “Even when I was poor and bad to hit the trail 1 jest loved them hills, so why ain’t it crafty to plke back to 'em now when I don't have to?” His triumphant finale was: “When you come to think sbout it, & rich man ein’t really got any more ex- cuse fur bein’ mis’able than a poor man has!” Back to the big hills that called him he ere had gone; away from the citles w people lived “too close together and far apart”; back to the green, earth where the air was free and quick and a man could see a hundred miles, and the people lived far enough apart to be neighborly. There content had blessed him again content net slothiful but Inciting; a ¢ tent that embraced his own beloved West, fashioning first in fancy and then by deed its own proud future. He asad never ceased to plan and stimulate its growth. He not only became ° with its manifold Interests, but proudly dedicated the young Daniel to its further making. He became an ardent and bigoted W or the East so prof scorn for the West chance equaled It. Prospecting with the simple outfit of old became his relaxation, his sport, and, as he aged, his hobby. It was sald that he haa exalted prospecting to the dignity of an art, and no longer hunted gold as a pot hunter. He was even reputed to have viluable deposits “covered” and certain it is that after Cveede made his riech find on Mammoth Mountain in 189, Peter Bines met him in Denver and gave him particulars about the vein which as yet Creede had divulged to no ons. ~Ques- tioned later concerning this, Petet Bines evaded answering directly, but suggested that a man who already had plenty of money might have done wisely to cover up the find and be still about it; that Nat Creede himself proved as much by going crazed over his wealth and blowing out his brains. To a tamely prosperous Easterner, who, some years after his return te the West, made the conventional remark, “And lsn't it amazing that you were happy through those hard years of tofl when you were g0 poor?’ Peter Bines had replied, to his questioner’s hopeless bewilderment: “No. But it is surprisin’ that [ kept happy after 1 got rich—after I got what I wanted. +] reckon you'll find,” he added, by way of explaining. “that the propoftion of happy rich to unhappy rich Is a mighty sight smaller than the proportion of hap- py poor to the unhappy poor I'm one of the former minority, all right—but, by Cripes! it's because 1 know how to be rich and still enjoy all the little comforta of poverty!” p. CHAPTER IIL BILLY BRUE FINDS HIS MAN. Each spring the old man grew restive and raw like an unbroken colt. And when the distant mountain peaks began (o swim In thelr summer haze and the little rushing rivers sang to him, pleading that he come once more to follow them up, he became uncontrollable. Every year at this time he alleged, with a show of irri- tation, that his health was belng sapped by the perniclous indulgence of sleeping on a bed Inside a house. He alleged, fur- ther, that stocks and bonds wers but shadows of wealth, that the old mines might any day Become exhausted, and that security for the future lay only in having one member of the family, at Jeast, looking up new pay-rock against the ever possible time of adversity. “They aint got to makin’ calendars yot with the rainy day marked on ‘em,” he would say. “A'most any one of them in- nocent lookin’ Mondays or Tuesdays or Wednesdays is liable to be it when you get right up on to it. I'll have to start my old bones out again, I see that. Things are beginnin’ to green up a'ready.” When he did go It was always under- stood to be positively for not more than two weeks. A list of his reasons for ex- tending the time each year to three or four months would constitute the ideal monograph on human du y. When hard pushed on his return, he had once or twice been even brazen enough to assert that he had lost his way in the mountain fastnesses. But, for all his protestations, no one when he left in June expected to see him again before September at the earliest. In these solitary tours he was busy and happy, working and playing. “Work,” he would say, “is something you want to get done; play is something you jest like to be doin’. Smoopin’ up these gulches is both of "em to me.” And so he loitered through the moun- tains, resting here, climbing there, mak- ing always a shrewd, close reading of the recks. It was thus Billy Brue found him at the end of his second day's search. A little off the trail, at the entrance to a pocket of the canyon, he towered erect to peer down when he heard the noise of the mes- senger’s ascent. Standing beside the bowl- der of gray granite, before a background of the gnarled dwarf cedars, his hat off, his blue shirt open at the neck, his bare forearms brown, hairy and muscular, & hammer In his right hand, his left resting lightly on nis hip, he might have been the Titan that had forged the bowlder at his side, pausing now for breath be- fore another mighty task. Well over six feet tall, still straight as any of hath ever by aay