The Gilded Age - Mark Twain [173]
“I’m free to say that I believe it, and the men all think so too. They are all old hands at this business.”
“Come Harry, let’s go up and look at it, just for the comfort of it,” said Philip. They came back in the course of an hour, satisfied and happy.
There was no more sleep for them that night. They lit their pipes, put a specimen of the coal on the table, and made it a kind of loadstone of thought and conversation.
“Of course,” said Harry, “there will have to be a branch track built, and a ‘switch-back’ up the hill.”
“Yes, there will be no trouble about getting the money for that now. We could sell out to-morrow for a handsome sum. That sort of coal doesn’t go begging within a mile of a rail-road. I wonder if Mr. Bolton would rather sell out or work it?”
“Oh, work it,” says Harry, “probably the whole mountain is coal now you’ve got to it.”
“Possibly it might not be much of a vein after all,” suggested Philip.
“Possibly it is; I’ll bet it’s forty feet thick. I told you. I knew the sort of thing as soon as I put my eyes on it.”
Philip’s next thought was to write to his friends and announce their good fortune. To Mr. Bolton he wrote a short, business letter, as calm as he could make it. They had found coal of excellent quality, but they could not yet tell with absolute certainty what the vein was. The prospecting was still going on. Philip also wrote to Ruth; but though this letter may have glowed, it was not with the heat of burning anthracite. He needed no artificial heat to warm his pen and kindle his ardor when he sat down to write to Ruth. But it must be confessed that the words never flowed so easily before, and he ran on for an hour disporting in all the extravagance of his imagination. When Ruth read it, she doubted if the fellow had not gone out of his senses. And it was not until she reached the postscript that she discovered the cause of the exhilaration. “P. S.—We have found coal.”
The news couldn’t have come to Mr. Bolton in better time. He had never been so sorely pressed. A dozen schemes which he had in hand, any one of which might turn up a fortune, all languished, and each needed just a little more money to save that which had been invested. He hadn’t a piece of real estate that was not covered with mortgages, even to the wild tract which Philip was experimenting on, and which had no marketable value above the incumbrance on it.
He had come home that day early, unusually dejected.
“I am afraid,” he said to his wife, “that we shall have to give up our house. I don’t care for myself, but for thee and the children.”
“That will be the least of misfortunes,” said Mrs. Bolton, cheerfully, “if thee can clear thyself from debt and anxiety, which is wearing thee out, we can live any where. Thee knows we were never happier than when we were in a much humbler home.”
“The truth is, Margaret, that affair of Bigler and Small’s has come on me just when I couldn’t stand another ounce. They have made another failure of it. I might have known they would; and the sharpers, or fools, I don’t know which, have contrived to involve me for three times as much as the first obligation. The security is in my hands, but it is good for nothing to me. I have not the money to do anything with the contract.”
Ruth heard this dismal news without great surprise. She had long felt that they were living on a volcano, that might go in to active operation at any hour. Inheriting from her father an active brain and the courage to undertake new things, she had little of his sanguine temperament which blinds one to difficulties and possible failures. She had little confidence in the many schemes which had been about to lift her father out of all his embarassments and into great wealth, ever since she was a child; as she grew older, she rather wondered that they were as prosperous as they seemed to be, and that they did not all go to smash amid so many brilliant projects. She was nothing but a woman, and did not know how much of the business prosperity of the world