Tabor’s other holdings which had sounded so spectacular and so promising on paper, turned out, many of them, to be literally paper. He had been duped or cheated by associates and friends for years without either of us realizing it. Some of his real estate was already mortgaged, and, when the blow first fell, he mortgaged the rest. Afterward we learned what a mistake that was. We should have learned to economize immediately. But none of the mining men believed the hard times would last. Ten Denver banks failed in three days during July and our cash went when they crashed. Gradually, with no money coming in, we could not meet payments on the mortgages. The banks wouldn’t loan us any more money and our property began to fall on the foreclosure block. “Take my jewels and sell them, Tabor,” I volunteered. “No, the day will come when you’ll wear them again. I’ll make another fortune. That gold mine I bought near Ward and never developed will help us out. The world wants gold now—not silver.” Before the house was taken from us, the Tabor Block in Denver and all the Leadville properties fell. What wasn’t taken for mortgages, began to go for unpaid taxes. When I had married Tabor, he had spent $10,000 a day during his thirty-day stay in Washington because at that time his income from the Matchless alone had been $80,000 a month. Yet just ten years after, we were actually worried about our grocery bill. I knew Tabor’s dearest possession, next to the Matchless mine, was the Tabor Grand Opera House. When the mortgage owners gave notice of foreclosure on that, I went personally to plead with young Horace Bennett for an extension of time and leniency. “We millionaires must all stick together,” I said. He regarded me with cold blue eyes and replied: “I am not a millionaire, Mrs. Tabor, and this is a business transaction. I appreciate how you and Mr. Tabor have sentimental feelings about the Opera House. But in that case, you shouldn’t have mortgaged it.” I could not make him share my belief that Tabor would recoup everything. In my innermost heart, I knew he would. But here was a new kind of man in Colorado who did not look at life the way the first-comers did. Those men were plungers, gay and generous. When they had money, they spent it and when they didn’t, they had the bravery to start out on new ventures and make other fortunes. When a friend was down, they loaned him more than he needed and forgot the loan. That was Tabor. But not these newcomers who were settling and growing prosperous in Colorado. And even my own brother! I went to Pete to save the Opera House for Tabor. “I haven’t the money, and even if I had, you’d only mortgage it over again for some silly extravagance,” he said.