"Oh, come off!" exclaimed my partner. "Wait till I present my card around this burg in the morning; then we will get all the breakfast we want."
We awoke hungry, as all men have a habit of doing when they are broke.
"I am going over to the Montana-Tonopah Mining Company's office," said Arkell. "A mining engineer by the name of Malcolm Macdonald makes his headquarters over there and he wants to sell some mining properties at Goldfield and in other parts of the State for about three million dollars."
"Yes," said Arkell. "I'll get the facts and wire them to my friend Joe Hoadley in New York."
"Say, Bill," I remonstrated, "they have a privately-owned jerkline telegraph in this town, and if you send any 'phony' telegrams over the wire, they'll be on to you. So don't do any of that kind of business."
"Nothing of the kind!" replied he promptly. "Any message I send to Hoadley he'll answer."
"I guess you have it fixed on the other end," I remarked. He laughed.
We strolled over to the State Bank and Trust Company building, across the street, and there met Malcolm Macdonald, a mining engineer from Butte, Montana, and his friend, Mr. Dunlap, who was at the time secretary of the Montana-Tonopah Mining Company. The conversation was not more than five minutes old when Arkell suggested that he would like to eat breakfast, but "didn't want any restaurants in his," intimating that he would like to have some good, old-fashioned home cooking. Mr. Dunlap remarked modestly that the camp was too young to boast of much home cooking, but that if we would be his guests he would guarantee to make arrangements for some special cooking at the Palace restaurant.
After breakfast, which consisted of mountain trout, the flavor of which was more delicious than anything I had tasted in many years--probably because of the artificial hunger which an empty purse had created--we returned to the office of the bank. There Arkell explained to Mr. Macdonald that he wanted "a big mining proposition or nothing." He said he represented big Eastern capital and that he was prepared to pay from one to three millions for the right kind of property. Mr. Macdonald named some mines and prospects which he said he was willing to sacrifice for $3,000,000.