Comstock Lode (Nev.) -- Fiction; Miners -- Fiction; Virginia City (Nev.) -- Fiction
"You are awfully good," said Miller; "but you are looking from your
standpoint. I looked from mine, and I could not do differently. But tell
me about this dreadful business. I saw about Wright, and read the
account of this fearful accident of yesterday as I was coming up in the
train, but still, there must have been some blundering somewhere."
Everything was explained, and also what had been discovered of the
effects of the dead miners.
"Poor grand souls," said Miller. "It was a tough ending. Never before
did three such royal hearts stop beating in a single fortnight on the
Comstock."
Ashley returned, and, with words full of affectionate reproach, greeted
Miller.
Ashley had found everything at the bank as the book indicated, and the
undertaker had promised that Brewster's remains should be ready for
shipment on the evening of the next day.
Then the question of the dispatch to the family came up again.
"Before deciding upon that," said Miller, "let me tell you something:
"When I took the money to pay the bills, I had, with a little of my own,
something over seven hundred dollars. I bought on a margin of only
twenty-five per cent.--the broker was my friend--all the Silver Hill
that the money would purchase. I thought I had a sure thing. My
informant was a Silver Hill miner. I believed I could multiply the money
by three within as many days. In five days it fell thirty per cent. What
could I do? A note from the broker asking me to call, received the
evening before I went away, decided me. I went away, but when I saw by
dispatches that Wright had been killed, and I could get nothing to do, I
determined to come back.
"Well, I met my broker this morning. He asked me to call at his place.
There he informed me that the day he purchased Silver Hill he met the
superintendent and learned from him that there was not yet a
development; that the stock was more liable to fall than to rise for two
or three weeks to come, the rage being just then for north end stocks.
He could not find me, and accordingly, on his own responsibility, he
sold the stock, losing nothing but commissions and cost of dispatches.
"There was a little lull in Sierra Nevada that day, and, believing it
was good, he bought with my money and on my account. As it shot up he
kept buying. At last, a week ago, he had two thousand shares and sold
five hundred, and by the sale paid himself all up except $21,000.
"Hearing day before yesterday that I had left the city, he sold the
other fifteen hundred shares at $157. This morning he handed me a
certificate of deposit in my favor for $213,000, and here it is."
Most heartily did the others congratulate Miller on his good fortune.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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