From this point the talk drifted on erratically as the train rushed towards the Sierras. The agreeable young man who read _Paradise Lost_ and was under bonds to justice seemed to have an extensive acquaintance in common with the grizzled miner. They discussed some Scotchman who had been mining but now owned an oil well in the “Midway field” that was reputed to be bringing in five thousand dollars a day. Another of their friends—an Englishman—had a silver “proposition” in Mexico. There was also Jimmie Birt who owned a string of horses and had sunk a fortune in a mine in British Columbia, but Jimmie, it seemed, was making good in Oregon timber land. So it went with one adventurer after another, roaming this side of the continent, now penniless, to-morrow with millions, restlessly darting from subarctic Alaska to subtropical Mexico along the coast or the mountain spine of the continent. They sought gold and silver and copper, oil and wood and cattle, water-power, wheat, and wine,—it made little odds what. Everything was a “big proposition” in which to make or lose. Brainard drank in the varied biography of this company of adventurers, his brain fired with the excitements of their risks. Krutzmacht, it seemed to him, must have been such a one as these. He was on the point of asking the old miner, who was the principal talker, if he had ever heard of Krutzmacht, when his ears caught the words: “I see by to-day’s San Francisco paper that a receivership has been asked for the Shasta companies. That means they’ve got Krutzmacht, don’t it?” “I expect so—he’s been on the edge some time from what I hear,” the younger man replied. “So they got him. . . . I thought Herb would make good—he was a nervy Dutchman, if there ever was one! But he couldn’t go up against that crowd.” “When he began building his road through the mountains to the Bay, the S. P. crowd went for him and shut off his credit. You’ve got to get permission to do some things in California.” “I’m told he’d built up a big property.” “That’s right—if he’d been able to hold on, there would have been millions, what with the power company, the timber, the railroad, and the land. That’s why the S. P. people wanted it! They waited, and when the panic came on, they began squeezing him. I saw him in New York a few days ago. I suppose he was trying to get money from some of those big Jew bankers where he’d got it before. But it isn’t the right time to pass the hat in Wall Street just now.”