The Popular Magazine/Volume 58/Number 4/The Implacable Friend/Chapter 6
CHAPTER VI.
SUPERSALESMANSHIP.
The far northern terminus of the spider web of telegraph-radia communication of our continent was a government-owned wire, strung across western Alaska to St. Michael, a radio span across Norton Sound to Port Safety, and a wire into Nome.
Ticely sauntered into the telegraph office. It was operated by the war department, but since it was the only means of quick communication with the outside world, Uncle Sam obligingly permitted its use to the population of Alaska, and Ticely used it.
He withdrew to the extreme end of the counter—a fact carelessly noted by the operator's assistant. When any person approached him, Ticely ceased writing and shut the little memorandum book—a code, possibly—he was using. This, again, drew the eyes of the assistant. He waited patiently, until the place was, for the moment, empty of outsiders, before he handed in his messages. The operator, Jones, as well as his assistant, Rosslyn, noticed that also. When the words were counted, and Ticely paid for the telegrams, he said quietly to the chief operator, looking slightly—ever so slightly—askance at the assistant:
“I know the service is confidential—but won't you please be very sure that no one sees your filed copies of these?”
Jones looked at Ticely a bit impatiently, but the latter's manner was too courteous, too innocent, to merit the rebuke of a just man like Jones, who merely muttered that it was, “All right; nobody'll see 'em.” Whereupon Ticely nodded, turned on his heel, and walked quickly out of the office.
There are men in every mining camp, as in every other community, who are cultivated parasites. They toil not, neither do they spin. But they seek to avail themselves of the luck or the industry of others. One or two of this ilk lodged at the Penny River Hotel, into which, at odd times, industrious little Othmer, the painter, dropped in, for a chat; and the circumstance of the queer-looking gold, which did not come from Candle, came up in conversation between Othmer and “Con” Redbank, who had seen Ticely pay for his lodgings in dust and had heard the brief colloquy concerning that dust. Then Othmer drew Redbank into a corner—the painter was known as a very “secretive” among the numerous persons with whom he shared his confidences—and told him that Ticely had traveled with him, Othmer, all the way from Safety, and had asked him to recommend a quiet place in which to stay—where no one would pay any attention to him. Those were not Ticely's words, but they faithfully expressed his meaning.
Redbank took his information to a man for whom, some years before, in the “upper country,” he had done considerable sleuthing—Slim Jim Collins, who had but recently come to Nome to look over a piece of bench ground, to which he had fallen heir in a deal he had made in Fairbanks. The ground was “no good,” but Collins was tarrying till spring—having, in the interim, glimpsed Joan Manners on the Nome streets. While waiting for some opportunity to meet her, under circumstances more favorable to him than before, he kept his experienced eye open for business chances.
“Watch him. He'll be selling something, pretty soon,” he told Redbank cynically, when the latter had related all he knew of the mysterious stranger.
“I'll watch him, Slim. Leave it to me.”
He knew that Collins always had loose cash for a “spec,” if the thing caught his fancy. The Fairbanks miner lived on the outskirts on the town, very quietly, with Miss O'Brien, Hennessy being an occasional dinner guest—and the only one. Men who lived with ex-dance-hall girls, even in a go-as-you-please mining camp, prefer domestic privacy. Therefore, Collins met his acquaintances in a favorite downtown hangout, the North Star Saloon.
Ticely was a very busy man. He quietly studied maps in surveyors' offices. He quietly learned of all the coastwise boats that plied northward toward Candle and the Kobuc country, and southward into Norton Sound, which reached deeply toward the Koyuk-Koyukuk divide. This had been Waring's mode of entry into the region of Midas. Quietly, too, he talked with merchants who sold sundry supplies and machinery necessary to the development of new placer ground. He was exceedingly unobtrusive, modest, talked little—even less in the presence of bystanders—and seemed, to the experienced eyes of the rapidly increasing number of persons who made it their business to gumshoe him about town, to wish, in every way, to avoid the suspicion of being a person in any wise out of the ordinary, or whose business was in any sense strange or mysterious. The sleuths saw plainly that he was making every effort to conceal the fact that he had anything to conceal! Ticely was absolutely the real thing!
The gumshoe squad increased, both in number and in vigilance.
A week after Ticely arrived in Nome he presented a letter to Judge Manners, from Bruce Waring. Manners greeted him as a friend. It was sufficient that he was the partner of the young man who had brought his girl to him from the Yukon.
The letter said:
- We have some pretty fair prospects up here, and Mr. Ticely will be in Nome to arrange, if he can, to bring in supplies and labor as early in the spring as possible. Any information you can give him or courtesies you can extend him will be appreciated by yours truly.
He said a little of the same sort in his letter to Joan, and a great deal more that was in no way related to business.
For all Ticely's quietness and inveterate habit of minding his own business, he was alert to observe the antics of the pussyfoots. For the most part, he knew who were sleuthing him and with whom they were connected. He was aware, for instance, that Con Redbank was a sort of henchman of affluent Jim Collins; and when he learned by accident that Ed Rosslyn, the telegraph operator, had become interested in his affairs, and saw him several times in company with Redbank, he left his cipher code back in his dunnage bag, in his room in the lodging house, for several days. And he inferred, from a very slight change in its position, with reference to other papers, that his room had been entered, the book found, and his telegrams decoded.
He was right. Three men at first, and others afterward, possessed copies of the texts of his telegrams, of which one was as follows:
- Ticely Realty Corporation, Seattle.
- Give Ethelbert Y. Lewisjohn following message. Prepare drop everything. Come to St. Michael first boat with two years' mining outfit. Information as to locality and instructions for reaching will be held for you there. Hold confidential and use extreme caution.
The second was directed to Francis L. Frieling, care, as before, the Ticely Realty Corporation. It directed Frieling to execute prearranged plans, and come at once to St. Michael. Absolute secrecy, it said, was essential to safety!
Edgar Y. Lewisjohn and Francis L. Frieling were imaginary persons. Or, at least, Ticely believed that these names, which were purely the product of his cranial laboratory, would prove imaginary persons, when looked up in the Seattle City directory by his faithful and perspicacious secretary—who would thereupon loudly guffaw, and file them in Ticely's own private file.
When Ticely found that his friends—for they were very friendly with him—had gained access to his room, he smiled, and diving deeply into his bag, brought up a small, locked leather case. Within it were certain mementoes of his Klondike mining, among them a little memorandum book, in which he had recorded his pannings for several days during January of the winter he worked the El Dorado lay. He noted with satisfaction that though the month and days were recorded in these random notes, the year was omitted. It was “the present year” to him, at that time, he reflected curiously, and it would seem the present year to anybody else now. It was the boldest of his many false impressions.
For several days he left the memorandum book, among his effects, on the rude dresser and was rewarded, before long, by proof that the book had been examined. He smiled sardonically at this discovery. But had he known what the consequences were to be, he would have paled instead.
It was inevitable that Ticely should become acquainted with a good many Nomeites. In winter, when Alaska coast towns are shrunk to their minimum population, when interests narrow, and every activity is keenly watched, no newcomer, as busy as Ticely, could escape the overtures of the alert and enterprising, once there had attached to his personality the flavor of whispered gossip and speculation. He met these overtures affably enough, for he was naturally and by cultivation “a good mixer.” He acknowledged he was arranging for the purchase and transport of a heavy outfit of mining supplies, and he made brief reply to the inquiries of his new acquaintances.
The questions put to him were many in form, but in substance only two. Where was the creek, and what were its prospects? To the first question, he replied that the locality was quite far away from Nome and he didn't care to describe it definitely, as it would be neither wise nor decent to start a stampede to a region which was as yet merely in the first stages of prospecting. As to the prospects themselves—they were fair, only fair. Nothing to get excited about in the least.
Ticely's truthful statements were taken as meaning nothing. They signified no more regarding the real nature of his find than your casual “Good morning” would signify respecting your real attitude toward the acquaintance who greets you in the street. To the ordinary man it implied merely that Ticely was discreet. But to those who were “wise” to certain facts it was evidence that fitted exactly into the structure they were carefully building for themselves.
To Slim Jim Collins, who had recently made his acquaintance and who was cultivating him assiduously, Ticely gave a few facts. They were really facts, and he mentioned them offhandedly, yet always with a slight, flattering flavor of “This is just between us, of course.” There was quite a little low-grade dirt out there—four or five cents to the pan. And on bed rock? Oh, it varied; a bit of coarse gold, now and then—ten or twenty cents. He hardly thought the bed rock would average over fifteen cents, and there was only about a foot of it.
“He's foxy, all right,” was Collins' size-up, when he told this to his friends who were assisting him—and themselves—in “getting in on the ground floor” of this new strike.
Collins, Redbank, and the rest had been conversing at a card table, in the rear of the North Star resort, and the miner from Fairbanks got slowly to his feet, and with a “Want to see me?” to a newcomer, named Tholmes, led him toward the bar. The others resumed their card playing.
“You're right, Mr. Collins,” said Tholmes, of the hardware firm of Tholmes & Hawthorne. “He'll take as much equipment as I'm willing to let go, up to several thousand. His first proposition was nervy, all right. He said he'd pay me five hundred dollars in cash and give me security on the balance. Now, I figure that if his ground's no good, and he can't pay, and the man I send along takes it all—well, he's too wise an old bird to pull anything like that on himself!”
“You're right,” agreed Collins, rotating the cigar in his mouth.
“Well, I told him nothing doing on perishable security like that; and his next proposition was a mortgage on a claim or two. He smiled when he suggested it, as much as to say: 'Of course you wouldn't do that, because you don't know anything about my ground.'”
“What did you say to that?”
“Why, just what we agreed on. I says, 'Taking a chance on unknown security is no good. If I win, all I get is the price of my goods, which is merely my money back. And if I lose I get nothing.'”
“And his answer?”
“He saw the point all right. He says: 'You mean you'd rather have an interest in the ground itself. Well, if you're willing to take a chance on just fair prospects, I'll give you a little. I suppose it's either that or cut down the outfit to what I can pay for.'”
“Which would mean losing his summer—practically a year. So he'll let go!”
“He'll let go. How much, I don't know.”
“No more than he can help, I suppose. I wouldn't, in his place. He can get help from these friends of his that he's been telegraphing to, on the outside, next autumn or spring, if he can sluice out enough gold this summer.”
“Think he's liable to do that?”
Slim Jim's eyes puckered shrewdly: “Did you ever see a man willing to wait, when he had big gold in the ground, if there was any way of getting it out? The cost don't matter—if there's plenty there!”
It was evident from this conversation, an extract of which was duly reported by Collins to the rest of the conspirators, that the Seattle realty operator was already in the position of a seemingly reluctant seller from whom many were scheming to buy. He was on the right side of the market! From that point on, things moved rapidly.