XXVII
THE next day Gregory visited a mine in Lewis and Clark County which recently had shut down, and bought a compressor at second hand. His miners with the air drills were soon working at five times the rate of speed that had been possible with the hand drills. The contractor in charge of the development work on what was impudently known as the Apex Mine, had installed a gasoline hoist, every new device, and as large a force as it was possible at that early stage to employ with profit. Gregory interviewed Osborne and Douglas, and obtained profuse assurances, but Mann soon discovered that there was an increased force on the Primo copper vein. Their original lease was nearly up but they had accepted Mark’s offer of two months’ grace; an offer he deeply regretted now, but the papers were signed and sealed. They made a feint of pushing the drift across the fault, but as they employed a small force at that point there was little room for doubt that they had been amply compensated for a doubtful undertaking.
Meanwhile work on the great surface chamber of Perch of the Devil Mine was drawing to a close. It had proved to be a hundred feet long, thirty feet wide, and seventy feet deep, and had netted half a million dollars. Some time since one of the larger houses on the West Side in Butte, built by a millionaire while still faithful to Montana, but whose family now spent twelve months of the year in Europe, New York, or California, had been thrown on the market for less than a third of its cost; new millionaires are not as plentiful in Amalgamated Butte as of old, and that unique camp is still a perch, even for those that make moderate fortunes; if no longer for the devil. It never will be a favourite roost for the gamecock’s hens and chicks. The hotels and “blocks” are always overcrowded, and even bungalows are in demand by the energetic but impermanent young engineers and managers of the variouscompanies; but “palatial residences,” built by enthusiastic citizens who either died promptly or retired in favour of their families, are a drug on that great market they helped to build. When the Murphy house, therefore, was advertised for sale Gregory bought it for Ida and cabled her the news together with five thousand dollars Mark had recently made for him on the stock-market.
Above these and other expenditures, he now had half a million dollars to his credit, but he wanted a million more. The new vein was very rich for chalcopyrite, but its depth was problematical, and it might drop in values at any moment. If his belief in his hill was justified and there were huge primary deposits below, there would be no end to his riches; but it would take a year or more to determine that point; and meanwhile he wanted at least a million and a half, not only to meet the possible expenses of litigation, but to mine at depth and to open up his other claims in case Amalgamated, when it reached the chalcopyrite vein, claimed that it apexed in their property, got out an injunction, and forced him to cease work on it.
But he had another and to him a still more vital reason for wishing to make a great sum of money. Half a million dollars, particularly when spectacularly acquired, alters a man’s position in his community at once, and the readjustment of his own mental attitude toward life follows as a matter of course; particularly in a country where money not only talks but rules. He was now treated, when business took him to any of the towns, as a permanent capitalist of the great state of Montana; moreover, his romantic attitude toward his hill having been inevitably dampened by its yield of mere copper, his appreciation of its heavy contribution to his bank account was wholly practical. He not only began to forecast himself as one of the small group of front-rank millionaires which Montana has donated to the American Brotherhood of Millionaires, but to be sensible of the sudden and active growth of those business instincts he had always known were dormant in his brain. It had needed but the rousing of his fighting instinct, the success of its first move, and the swift countermove of the enemy, to awaken the permanent desire, not alone to pit his brains against Amalgamated, but to show the world what he could do. In short he was on his mettle,and conscious for the first time of his powers and ultimate ambitions.
He had found his mine by an accident. Nature had flung it into his lap. He was now determined to prove that he could make money with the resources of his brain as rapidly as the more famous of the Montanans had made it in the past, when opportunities were supposed to be more numerous. There never was a time when opportunity did not coincide with the man, and of this Gregory was contemptuously aware when he dismissed the usual Wall Street resource as commonplace, beneath the consideration of a man living in a state whose resources had barely been tapped.
When live brains of peculiar gifts think hard and uninterruptedly on a given subject they become magnets. Gregory paid frequent visits to Butte and Helena, talking casually with many men. In less than a fortnight he found his cue, and, accompanied by a civil engineer, disappeared for a week.