Even then he didn't give up for good. He made his way back to a stage station and sent through a wire to Pyramid askin' for instructions. More than a month he waited, with no word from Gordon. Seems that by then Pyramid was too busy with other things. He'd cashed in on his bluff and was sortin' a new hand. And maybe he wa'n't anxious to have Hammond come East again. Anyway, he let him shift.
That was when Hammond came so near starvin'. But he didn't--quite. For a year or more he managed to live somehow. Then one day he drove a team of boneyard mules into Blue Dog with a wagonload of stuff that the natives stared at. It was white, shiny stuff. Hammond said it was borax. He'd discovered a big deposit of it out there in the blisterin' sand. He was goin' to ship it back East and sell it. They thought he was nutty. He wasn't, though. On East they was usin' a lot of borax and demandin' more.
With a few thousand back of him Hammond might have got to be the Borax King right then; but as it was he held onto an interest big enough to make him quite a plute, and inside of a year he was located in Denver and earnin' his nickname of Hungry Jim. His desert appetite had stayed with him, you see, and such little whims as orderin' a three-inch tenderloin steak frescoed with a pound of mushrooms and swimmin' in the juice squeezed from a pair of canvasback ducks got to be a reg'lar thing for him.
It was there he met and married the husky built head waitress and moved into a double-breasted mansion up on Capitol Hill. Also he begun wearin' diamond shirtstuds and givin' wine dinners.
"But, like others of his kind," goes on J. Bayard, "his luck didn't last. Because he'd made one big strike, he thought he knew the mining game from top to bottom. He lost hundreds of thousands on wild ventures. His long drawn out suit against Pyramid was another expensive luxury; for in the end Gordon beat him.
"It was Hammond's big appetite that finished him off, though,--acute indigestion. So that is why Pyramid leaves us this item in his list: 'The widow or other survivor of James R. Hammond.' Well, I've found them both, Mrs. Hammond and her son Royce. I haven't actually seen either of 'em as yet; but I have located Mrs. Hammond's attorney and had several conferences with him. And what do you think? She won't take a dollar of Gordon's money for herself; nor will Royce directly. There's one thing, however, that she will probably not refuse,--any social assistance we may give to her son. That's her chief ambition, it seems,--to see Royce get into what she considers smart society. Well, what do you say, McCabe? Can't we help?"