The Spenders | Page 3

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