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The Spenders

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[Illustration: "_THE FAIR AND SOMETIMES UNCERTAIN DAUGHTER OF THE HOUSE
OF MILBREY_." (See page 182.)]




THE SPENDERS

A TALE OF THE THIRD GENERATION

BY

HARRY LEON WILSON



_Illustrated by_ O'NEILL LATHAM

1902




To L. L. J.




FOREWORD

The wanderers of earth turned to her--outcast of the older lands--
With a promise and hope in their pleading, and she reached them pitying
hands;
And she cried to the Old-World cities that drowse by the Eastern main:
"Send me your weary, house-worn broods and I'll send you Men again!
Lo, here in my wind-swept reaches, by my marshalled peaks of snow,
Is room for a larger reaping than your o'ertilled fields can grow.
Seed of the Main Seed springing to stature and strength in my sun,
Free with a limitless freedom no battles of men have won,"
For men, like the grain of the corn fields, grow small in the huddled
crowd,
And weak for the breath of spaces where a soul may speak aloud;
For hills, like stairways to heaven, shaming the level track,
And sick with the clang of pavements and the marts of the trafficking
pack.
Greatness is born of greatness, and breadth of a breadth profound;
The old Antaean fable of strength renewed from the ground
Was a human truth for the ages; since the hour of the Edenbirth
That man among men was strongest who stood with his feet on the earth!

SHARLOT MABRIDTH HALL.




CONTENTS


CHAPTER

I. The Second Generation Is Removed

II. How the First Generation Once Righted Itself

III. Billy Brue Finds His Man

IV. The West Against the East

V. Over the Hills

VI. A Meeting and a Clashing

VII. The Rapid-fire Lorgnon Is Spiked

VIII. Up Skiplap Canon

IX. Three Letters, Private and Confidential

X. The Price of Averting a Scandal

XI. How Uncle Peter Bines Once Cut Loose

XII. Plans for the Journey East

XIII. The Argonauts Return to the Rising Sun

XIV. Mr. Higbee Communicates Some Valuable Information

XV. Some Light With a Few Side-lights

XVI. With the Barbaric Hosts

XVII. The Patricians Entertain

XVIII. The Course of True Love at a House Party

XIX. An Afternoon Stroll and an Evening Catastrophe

XX. Doctor Von Herslich Expounds the Hightower Hotel and Certain Allied
Phenomena

XXI. The Diversions of a Young Multi-millionaire

XXII. The Distressing Adventure of Mrs. Bines

XXIII. The Summer Campaign Is Planned

XXIV. The Sight of a New Beauty, and Some Advice from Higbee

XXV. Horace Milbrey Upholds the Dignity of His House

XXVI. A Hot Day in New York, with News of an Interesting Marriage

XXVII. A Sensational Turn in the Milbrey Fortunes

XXVIII. Uncle Peter Bines Comes to Town With His Man

XXIX. Uncle Peter Bines Threatens to Raise Something

XXX. Uncle Peter Inspires His Grandson to Worthy Ambitions

XXXI. Concerning Consolidated Copper and Peter Bines as Matchmakers

XXXII. Devotion to Business and a Chance Meeting

XXXIII. The Amateur Napoleon of Wall Street

XXXIV. How the Chinook Came to Wall Street

XXXV. The News Broken, Whereupon an Engagement is Broken

XXXVI. The God in the Machine

XXXVII. The Departure of Uncle Peter--And Some German Philosophy

XXXVIII. Some Phenomena Peculiar to Spring

XXXIX. An Unusual Plan of Action Is Matured

XL. Some Rude Behaviour, of Which Only a Western Man Could Be Guilty

XLI. The New Argonauts




ILLUSTRATIONS


"The fair and sometimes uncertain daughter of the house of Milbrey"

"'Well, Billy Brue,--what's doin'?'"

"The spell was broken"

"'Why, you'd be Lady Casselthorpe, with dukes and counts takin' off
their crowns to you'"

"'Remember that saying of your pa's, "it takes all kinds of fools to
make a world"'"

"'Say it that way--" Miss Milbrey is engaged with Mr. Bines, and can't
see you"'"




THE SPENDERS




CHAPTER I.

The Second Generation is Removed


When Daniel J. Bines died of apoplexy in his private car at Kaslo
Junction no one knew just where to reach either his old father or his
young son with the news of his death. Somewhere up the eastern slope of
the Sierras the old man would be leading, as he had long chosen to lead
each summer, the lonely life of a prospector. The young man, two years
out of Harvard, and but recently back from an extended European tour,
was at some point on the North Atlantic coast, beginning the season's
pursuit of happiness as he listed.

Only in a land so young that almost the present dwellers therein have
made it might we find individualities which so decisively failed to
blend. So little congruous was the family of Bines in root, branch, and
blossom, that it might, indeed, be taken to picture an epic of Western
life as the romancer would tell it. First of the line stands the figure
of Peter Bines, the pioneer, contemporary with the stirring days of
Frémont, of Kit Carson, of Harney, and Bridger; the fearless strivers
toward an ever-receding West, fascinating for its untried dangers as
for its fabled wealth,--the sturdy, grave men who fought and toiled and
hoped, and realised in varying measure, but who led in sober truth a
life such as the colours of no taleteller shall ever be high enough to
reproduce.

Next came Daniel J. Bines, a type of the builder and organiser who
followed the trail blazed by the earlier pioneer; the genius who,
finding the magic realm opened, forthwith became its exploiter to its
vast renown and his own large profit, coining its wealth of minerals,
lumber, cattle, and grain, and adventurously building the railroads
that must always be had to drain a new land of savagery.

Nor would there be wanting a third--a figure of this present day,
containing, in potency at least, the stanch qualities of his two rugged
forbears,--the venturesome spirit that set his restless grandsire to
roving westward, the power to group and coordinate, to "think three
moves ahead" which had made his father a man of affairs; and, further,
he had something modern of his own that neither of the others
possessed, and yet which came as the just fruit of the parent vine: a
disposition perhaps a bit less strenuous, turning back to the risen
rather than forward to the setting sun; a tendency to rest a little
from the toil and tumult; to cultivate some graces subtler than those
of adventure and commercialism; to make the most of what had been done
rather than strain to the doing of needless more; to live, in short,
like a philosopher and a gentleman who has more golden dollars a year
than either philosophers or gentlemen are wont to enjoy.

And now the central figure had gone suddenly at the age of fifty-two,
after the way of certain men who are quick, ardent, and generous in
their living. From his luxurious private car, lying on the side-track
at the dreary little station, Toler, private secretary to the
millionaire, had telegraphed to the headquarters of one important
railway company the death of its president, and to various mining,
milling, and lumbering companies the death of their president,
vice-president, or managing director as the case might be. For the
widow and only daughter word of the calamity had gone to a mountain
resort not far from the family home at Montana City.

There promised to be delay in reaching the other two. The son would
early read the news, Toler decided, unless perchance he were off at
sea, since the death of a figure like Bines would be told by every
daily newspaper in the country. He telegraphed, however, to the young
man's New York apartments and to a Newport address, on the chance of
finding him.

Locating old Peter Bines at this season of the year was a feat never
lightly to be undertaken, nor for any trivial end. It being now the
10th of June, it could be known with certainty only that in one of four
States he was prowling through some wooded canon, toiling over a windy
pass, or scaling a mountain sheerly, in his ancient and best loved
sport of prospecting. Knowing his habits, the rashest guesser would not
have attempted to say more definitely where the old man might be.

The most promising plan Toler could devise was to wire the
superintendent of the "One Girl" Mine at Skiplap. The elder Bines, he
knew, had passed through Skiplap about June 1st, and had left, perhaps,
some inkling of his proposed route; if it chanced, indeed, that he had
taken the trouble to propose one.

Pangburn, the mine superintendent, on receipt of the news, despatched
five men on the search in as many different directions. The old man was
now seventy-four, and Pangburn had noted when last they met that he
appeared to be somewhat less agile and vigorous than he had been twenty
years before; from which it was fair to reason that he might be playing
his solitary game at a leisurely pace, and 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 Little 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," said Pangburn, "over along
the west side of Horseback Ridge, just beyond Eden. When he pulled out
he was talking about some likely float-rock he'd picked up over that
way last summer. You'd 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 these 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 Association, 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 piece of intelligence after six readings, but
he refrained from comment, beyond thanking God, in thought, that he
could mind his own business under excessive provocation to do
otherwise. He considered it no meddling, however, to remember that Mrs.
Daniel J. Bines, widow of his late employer, could appear neither young
nor beautiful to the most sanguine of newsgatherers; nor to remember
that he happened to know she had not accompanied her husband on his
last trip of inspection over the Kaslo Division of the Sierra Northern
Railway.




CHAPTER II.

How the First Generation Once Righted Itself


By some philosophers unhappiness is believed--rather than coming from
deprivation or infliction--to result from the individual's failure to
select from a number of possible occupations one that would afford him
entire satisfaction with life and himself. To this perverse blindness
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 much
of it tends to destroy that judicial calm necessary to a wise choice of
recreations; to incline the possessor, perhaps, toward those that are
unsalutary.

Concerning the old man that Billy Brue now sought with his news of
death, a philosopher of this school would unhesitatingly 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 meagre outfit, picked up float-rock, tapped and scanned
ledges, and chipped at boulders with the same ardour that had fired him
in his penniless youth.

Back in 1850, a young man of twenty-four, he had joined the rush to
California, working his passage as deck-hand on a vessel that doubled
the Horn. Landing without capital at San Francisco, the little seaport
settlement among the shifting yellow sand-dunes, he had worked six
weeks along the docks as roustabout 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 the California
creeks for vagrant particles of gold. Then, in the late fifties, he
joined a mad stampede to the Frazer River gold-fields in British
Columbia, still wild over its first knowledge of silver sulphurets, he
was drawn back by the wonder-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 and a third of a mile wide,
high up on the eastern slope of Mount Davidson, he beheld more millions
taken out than the wildest enthusiast had ever before ventured to dream
of. But Peter Bines was a luckless unit of the majority that had
perforce to live on the hope produced by others' findings. The time for
his strike had not come.

For ten years more, half-clad in flannel shirt and overalls, he lived
in flimsy tents, tattered canvas houses, and sometimes 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, fastidiously
cut to fit a stove-pipe. That he never possessed a stove-pipe had made
this feature of the architecture not less sumptuous and engaging. He
lived chiefly on salt pork and beans, cooked over smoky camp-fires.

Through it all 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 golden specks from the
sand of a sage-brush plain, or sought the mother-ledge of some
wandering 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 its
birthright.

Some day the inexhaustible placer would be found; or, on a mountainside
where the porphyry was stained, he would carelessly chip off a fragment
of rock, turn it up to the sun, and behold it rich in ruby silver; or,
some day, the vein instead of pinching out would widen; there would be
pay ore almost from the grass-roots--rich, yellow, free-milling gold,
so that he could put up a little arastra, beat out enough in a week to
buy a small stamp-mill, and then, in six months--ten years more of this
fruitless but nourishing certainty were his,--ten years of the awful
solitudes, shared sometimes by his hardy and equally confident wife,
and, at the last, by his boy, who had become old enough to endure with
his father the snow and ice of the mountain tops and the withering heat
of the alkali wastes.

Footsore, hungry most of the time, alternately burned and frozen, he
lived the life cheerfully and tirelessly, with an enthusiasm that never
faltered.

When his day came it brought no surprise, so freshly certain had he
kept of its coming through the twenty years of search.

At his feet, one July morning in 1870, he noticed a piece of
dark-stained rock in a mass of driftstones. 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 parent stock
from which this precious fragment had been broken. The sun beat hotly
upon him as it had on other days through all the hard years when
certainty, after all, was nothing more than a temperamental faith. All
day he climbed and searched methodically, 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 above 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 boulder of projecting
silicate. It was there.

During the following week he ascertained the dimensions of his vein of
silver ore, and located two claims. He named them "The Stars and
Stripes" and "The American Boy," paying thereby what he considered
tributes, equally deserved, to his native land and to his only son,
Daniel, in whom were centred his fondest hopes.

A year of European travel had followed for the family, a 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 a year of tentative residence in the East. That year was less
satisfactory. The novelty of being sufficiently fed, clad, and
sheltered was losing its fine edge.

Penniless and constrained to a life of privation, Peter Bines had been
strangely happy. Rich and of consequence in a community where the ways
were all of pleasantness and peace, Peter Bines became restless,
discontented, and, at last, unmistakably miserable.

"It can't be because I'm rich," he argued; "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 habit of considering, in a leisurely and hospitable manner,
even the reverse sides of propositions that are commonly accepted by
men without question.

"The money _can't_ prevent me from doin' what I jest want
to--certain--but, maybe, _don't_ it? If I didn't have it I'd fur sure
be back in the hills and happy, and so would Evalina, that ain't had
hardly what you could call 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 a luxury what he had once been
constrained to as a necessity.

"Even when I was poor and had to hit the trail I jest loved them hills,
so why ain't it crafty to pike back to 'em now when I don't have to?"

His triumphant finale was:

"When you come to think about it, a rich man ain't really got any more
excuse fur bein' mis'able than a poor man has!"

Back to the big hills that called him had he gone; away from the cities
where people lived "too close together and too far apart;" back to the
green, rough 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
neighbourly.

There content had blessed him again; content not slothful but inciting;
a content that embraced his own beloved West, fashioning first in fancy
and then by deed, its own proud future. He had never ceased to plan and
stimulate its growth. He not only became one with its manifold
interests, but proudly dedicated the young Daniel to its further
making. He became an ardent and bigoted Westerner, with a scorn for the
East so profound that no Easterner's scorn for the West hath ever by
any chance equalled it.

Prospecting with the simple outfit of old became his relaxation, his
sport, and, as he aged, his hobby. It was said that he had exalted
prospecting to the dignity of an art, and no longer hunted gold as a
pot-hunter. He was even reputed to have valuable deposits "covered,"
and certain it is that after Creede made his rich find on Mammoth
Mountain in 1890, Peter Bines met him in Denver and gave him
particulars about the vein which as yet Creede had divulged to no one.
Questioned later concerning this, Peter 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 crazy over his wealth and
blowing out his brains.

To a tamely prosperous Easterner who, some years after his return to
the West, made the conventional remark, "And isn't it amazing that you
were happy through those hard years of toil when you were so poor?"
Peter Bines had replied, to his questioner's hopeless bewilderment:
"No. But it _is_ surprisin' that I kept happy after I got rich--after I
got what I wanted.

"I reckon you'll find," he added, by way of explaining, "that the
proportion of happy rich to unhappy rich is a mighty sight smaller than
the proportion of happy poor to the unhappy poor. I'm one of the former
minority, all right,--but, by cripes! it's because I know how to be
rich and still enjoy all the little comforts of poverty!"




CHAPTER III.

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 to swim in their 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 irritation, that his health was being sapped by
the pernicious indulgence of sleeping on a bed inside a house. He
alleged, further, that stocks and bonds were 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 least,
looking up new pay-rock against the ever possible time of adversity.

"They ain't got to makin' calendars yet with the rainy day marked on
'em," he would say. "A'most any one of them innocent 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 understood
to be positively for not more than two weeks. A list of his reasons for
extending the time each year to three or four months would constitute
the ideal monograph on human duplicity. 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'. Snoopin' up these gulches
is both of 'em to me."

And so he loitered through the mountains, resting here, climbing there,
making always a shrewd, close reading of the rocks.

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 cañon, he
towered erect to peer down when he heard the noise of the messenger's
ascent. Standing beside a boulder of grey 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, a hammer in his
right hand, his left resting lightly on his hip, he might have been the
Titan that had forged the boulder at his side, pausing now for breath
before another mighty task. Well over six feet tall, still straight as
any of the pines before him, his head and broad shoulders in the easy
poise of power, there was about him from a little distance no sign of
age. His lines were gracefully full, his bearing had still the
alertness of youth. One must have come as near as Billy Brue now came
to detect the marks of time in his face. Not of age--merely of time;
for here was no senility, no quavering or fretful lines. The grey eyes
shone bright and clear from far under the heavy, unbroken line of brow,
and the mouth was still straight and firmly held, a mouth under sure
control from corner to corner. A little had the years brought out the
rugged squareness of the chin and the deadly set of the jaws; a little
had they pressed in the cheeks to throw the high bones into broad
relief. But these were the utmost of their devastations. Otherwise
Peter Bines showed his seventy-four years only by the marks of a
well-ordered maturity. His eyes, it is true, had that look of _knowing_
which to the young seems always to betoken the futility of, and to warn
against the folly of, struggle against what must be; yet they were kind
eyes, and humourous, with many of the small lines of laughter at their
corners. Reading the eyes and mouth together one perceived gentleness
and sternness to be well matched, working to any given end in amiable
and effective compromise. "Uncle Peter" he had long been called by the
public that knew him, and his own grandchildren had come to call him by
the same term, finding him too young to meet their ideal of a
grandfather. Billy Brue, riding up the trail, halted, nodded, and was
silent. The old man returned his salutation as briefly. These things by
men who stay much alone come to be managed with verbal economy. They
would talk presently, but greetings were awkward.

Billy Brue took one foot from its stirrup and turned in his saddle,
pulling the leg up to a restful position. Then he spat, musingly, and
looked back down the cañon aimlessly, throwing his eyes from side to
side where the grey granite ledges showed through the tall spruce and
pine trees.

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