Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town Stephen Leacock (ready to read books TXT) đ
- Author: Stephen Leacock
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Jefferson had looked at so many prospectuses and so many pictures of mines and pine trees and smelters, that I think heâd forgotten that heâd never been in the country. Anyway, whatâs two hundred miles!
To an onlooker it certainly didnât seem so simple. I never knew the meanness, the trickery, of the mining business, the sheer obstinate determination of the bigger capitalists not to make money when they might, till I heard the accounts of Jeffâs different mines. Take the case of Corona Jewel. There was a good mine, simply going to ruin for lack of common sense.
âShe ainât been developed,â Jeff would say. âThereâs silver enough in her so you could dig it out with a shovel. Sheâs full of it. But they wonât get at her and work her.â
Then heâd take a look at the pink and blue certificates of the Corona Jewel and slam the drawer on them in disgust. Worse than that was the Silent Pineâ âa clear case of stupid incompetence! Utter lack of engineering skill was all that was keeping the Silent Pine from making a fortune for its holders.
âThe only trouble with that mine,â said Jeff, âis they wonât go deep enough. They followed the vein down to where it kind oâ thinned out and then they quit. If theyâd just go right into her good, theyâd get it again. Sheâs down there all right.â
But perhaps the meanest case of all was the Northern Star. That always seemed to me, every time I heard of it, a straight case for the criminal law. The thing was so evidently a conspiracy.
âI bought her,â said Jeff, âat thirty-two, and she stayed right there tight, like she was stuck. Then a bunch of these fellers in the city started to drive her down and they got her pushed down to twenty-four, and I held on to her and they shoved her down to twenty-one. This morning theyâve got her down to sixteen, but I donât mean to let go. No, sir.â
In another fortnight they shoved her, the same unscrupulous crowd, down to nine cents, and Jefferson still held on. âTheyâre working her down,â he admitted, âbut Iâm holding her.â
No conflict between vice and virtue was ever grimmer.
âSheâs at six,â said Jeff, âbut Iâve got her. They canât squeeze me.â
A few days after that, the same criminal gang had her down further than ever.
âTheyâve got her down to three cents,â said Jeff, âbut Iâm with her. Yes, sir, they think they can shove her clean off the market, but they canât do it. Iâve boughten in Johnsonâs shares, and the whole of Netleyâs, and Iâll stay with her till she breaks.â
So they shoved and pushed and clawed her downâ âthat unseen nefarious crowd in the cityâ âand Jeff held on to her and they writhed and twisted at his grip, and thenâ â
And thenâ âwell, thatâs just the queer thing about the mining business. Why, sudden as a flash of lightning, it seemed, the news came over the wire to the Mariposa Newspacket, that they had struck a vein of silver in the Northern Star as thick as a sidewalk, and that the stock had jumped to seventeen dollars a share, and even at that you couldnât get it! And Jeff stood there flushed and half-staggered against the mirror of the little shop, with a bunch of mining scrip in his hand that was worth forty thousand dollars!
Excitement! It was all over the town in a minutes. They ran off a news extra at the Mariposa Newspacket, and in less than no time there wasnât standing room in the barber shop, and over in Smithâs Hotel they had three extra barkeepers working on the lager beer pumps.
They were selling mining shares on the Main Street in Mariposa that afternoon and people were just clutching for them. Then at night there was a big oyster supper in Smithâs caff, with speeches, and the Mariposa band outside.
And the queer thing was that the very next afternoon was the funeral of young Fizzlechip, and Dean Drone had to change the whole text of his Sunday sermon at two daysâ notice for fear of offending public sentiment.
But I think what Jeff liked best of it all was the sort of public recognition that it meant. Heâd stand there in the shop, hardly bothering to shave, and explain to the men in the armchairs how he held her, and they shoved her, and he clung to her, and what heâd said to himselfâ âa perfect Iliadâ âwhile he was clinging to her.
The whole thing was in the city papers a few days after with a photograph of Jeff, taken specially at Ed Mooreâs studio (upstairs over Netleyâs). It showed Jeff sitting among palm trees, as all mining men do, with one hand on his knee, and a dog, one of those regular mining dogs, at his feet, and a look of piercing intelligence in his face that would easily account for forty thousand dollars.
I say that the recognition meant a lot to Jeff for its own sake. But no doubt the fortune meant quite a bit to him too on account of Myra.
Did I mention Myra, Jeffâs daughter? Perhaps not. Thatâs the trouble with the people in Mariposa; theyâre all so separate and so differentâ ânot a bit like the people in the citiesâ âthat unless you hear about them separately and one by one you canât for a moment understand what theyâre like.
Myra had golden hair and a Greek face and would come bursting through the barber shop in a hat at least six inches wider than what they wear in
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