"So," says he, "I know I've got Old Man Wisner broke right now. He's been over to Holland to see if he couldn't form a Dutch syndicate for to unload on. The Dutch is the last resort of the American landboomer. When you can't sell out a bunch of greasewood land for a pineapple colony to no one else, go over and sell it to them Dutch; they're easy. I seen a man one time sell almost all the north end of New Mexico to a Dutch syndicate for a coffee plantation. It was good for cows; but he had pictures of steamboats and canals and things out there in the sagebrush--you've got to have a canal on your blueprint if you sell anything to them Holland people. Like enough Old Man Wisner had pictures of canals. But he couldn't sell this property none, following on the war over there; they're busy with other things. "The result is he's come back here broke. He knows the banks has got wise and they ain't going to back him no further than they have. They're too busy lending a billion dollars or so to the folks over in Europe to help blow up some steamboats for us. "Therefore," says he, jarring the paper weight on the table when he brings down his fist, "if times gets any harder, as like enough they will, Dave Wisner's got to let that property go on the market for what it'll bring inside his one year of grace after foreclosure. I know what that means; it'll mean I got a few thousand acres of land more to distribute among my heirs and assigns, my executors, friends, faithful servitors, villagers and others--however you got that figured out in them papers. "Let me see them papers," says he after a while. "Are you shore you got my girl's name spelled Katherine? And that she gets this city residence here?" Then they went over it again. But after a while the lawyer got done, and so did the barber, and they both went away; and the old man turns to me. "Curly," says he, "I'm rich. I'm awful rich. I didn't know how rich I was till I begun to figure it up with Fanstead, Maclay & Horn, my lawyers here. I reckon, taking fair values, I'm worth ten or twelve million dollars--maybe twenty or forty--most of it made in this here town in a couple of years or so, and all out of the Wisner money we got for the ranch, which we're going to get back pretty nigh clean of cost, you might say. I didn't mean to; but I'm rich--awful rich!