The Aberdeen weekly., 1922-03-10
CHAPT ER III.
Waits and strays.

P
Waits and Strays.
When I crawled out of my berth at
the pOrter's call the next morning, my
Pullman was standing in the Denver
yard. While l was shaving in the
washroom asked the colored boy if
my smoking-room chum of the night
before was up yet.
"Yas. sab; he done been up an gone,
for the longest"
OF course, this was mere idle ques-
tiOning on my part. Tracing the
brOwn-bearded mining engineer who
had used me as a convenient dumping
ground for his story was the least of
my intention at the moment. For that
matter, since we hadn't exchanged
cards, and I wasn't even sure that I'd
heard his name straight, l couldn't
have traced him If ] lad wanted to.
Recalling the story in the garish
light of another day, it seemed a bit
less credible than it had while l was
listening to it, and I began to wonder
if the teller Of it might not be mem
ber of the deathless guild of smoke
room rOmancers. / buried the story
forgotten. when 1 took taxi for the
hotel. After an excellent breakfast
made a few inquiries about the meri-
dian the 105th, that the maps showed
as passing just west of the city. The
maps were right. The 103th meridian,
which is the one from which mountain
time is reckOned, ran a little west of
the city proper. and, by consequence,
west of the two other principal cities
Of the state, Colorado Springs and
Pueblo
found that the 1O5th meridian,
tracing it north from Denver, stops
short against the 4Oth parallel of lati-
tude just south of little town called
Erie. Traced south, it tracks the D.
r. q. railroad for about twenty
miles and then takes to the mountain.
barely shutting out ManitOu, and pass
ing, of course, well to the west
ward of Pueblo This simplifed mat
ters-a little.
Yet this business of wandering aim
lessly from post to pillar, combing the
face of nature for blue-eyed mafdens
and piebald horses and harIequin-faced
dogs was already beginning to strike
me as about the most fantastic thing q
body could conceive of doing. To at
tempt it without plan of some kind
seemed worse than useless so. for per.
haps the first time in a pretty rattle
Drained life 1 sat down to do some
ground-and-IOfty head work, with |
Cousin Percy's letter for a sort of |
neXus.
The third paragraph contained the |
meat of the matter: your portion of |
Grandfather Jasper's property was ]
worth. at its latest valuation some |
thing like S44O,00O" What single piece |
of property outside of l large city |
could be worth any such sum as that? |
could think of nothing but mine of |
some kind, unless 1T might be a cattle |
ranch or a growth of standing timber; |
and in the area laid out for me, mines |
would outvote cattle or timber about a |
hundred TO one 1 thought.
Then there was that other phrase: |
cit lies in a perfectly safe repository. |
. Repository" implied a recep- /
tacle or cOntainer of some sort a brick !
wall, or a barbed-wire fence. or any in |
closing thing you like to imagine Could |
a mine be said to be a repository?
AS you see, 1 kept coming back TO /
the mine idea, in spite of all l could |
do: and at last. without a word of /
warning. and right out of a clear sky, |
as you may say, smack a thing hit |
me squarely between the shoulder
beard and his eccentric
old gentleman!
I ryof aO0Io1 -
admit that there was something less
than one chance in a thousand that, at
the price of a couple of cigars given to
a fellow traveller in distress, l had pur-
chased any real clue to my own puzzle
Yet I couldn't get away from the
notion that / was on the verge of dis
cOvery. Oddly enough the miraculous
part Of 1.-THE one chance in million
that / should run across the one per-
son in hundred million who could tell
me that particular story-didn't inn
press me at the time. l was too busily
engaged in trying to fit the puzzle
pieces together to think of anything
else at the moment.
Come to sum them up, they fitted as
we'll Grandfather Jasper
had always been exceedingly close
when speaking of his invest
ments. Added to that, he would be
the last man in the world to have con-
fessed that he had been bitten, even in
by a "gold-brick' game Then,
too, the course he had pursued with
the mining engineer (always granting
the truth of Brown-beard's story was
just like him he would have wanted
year In which to think it over-or may
be longer. Also, it was Ike him to
keep all the Identifying marks as
carefully hidden as a nut meat in its
shell.
At this point began TO think about
getting action. One word from Bull
ton. or Bulletin, or whatever his name