To Sail Beyond the Sunset (20 page)

“He’ll give birth to a porcupine. Breech presentation.”

“No, he’ll fire you. Oh, he may possibly offer you a counterproposal; it may take a while. But he will fire you. Briney, would it suit you to stop on your way home at Wyandotte Office Supply and buy a secondhand Oliver typewriter? Pretty please? No, best to rent one for a month with privilege of applying rent on purchase; I should try it out before we tie up so much money. In the meantime we’ll design some stationery. ‘Brian Smith Associates,’ I think. Mining Consultants. No, Business Consultants. Mining Properties. Farms and Ranches. Mineral Rights. Petroleum Rights. Water Rights.”

“Hey, I don’t know all those things.”

“You will.” I patted my tummy. “Three months from now this little boiled pig will ring the cash register for us.” I thought about the double eagle Father had slipped into my purse on our wedding day. I had never spent it; I was fairly sure Briney did not know that I had it. Father’s formal wedding present to us had been a check that had gone into furniture for that little crackerbox we had first lived in. “Dear, I guarantee to keep us fed until you can report this baby to Judge Sperling. Then the Foundation’s payment for this baby ought to keep us going for a while…and you and I can try to ring the cash register a fifth time before the cash from number four runs out.”

I went on, “If the business isn’t making money by then, it might be time for you to look for a job. But I’m betting that from now on you will always be your own boss…and that we will wind up rich. I have confidence in you, sir. That’s why I married you.”

“Really? I thought there was another reason. That wee bit of proud flesh.”

“There’s that, I admit. A contributing factor. But don’t change the subject. You’ve given Mr. Fones more than six hard-working years—much of your time away from home—and now he wants to indenture you, make you his bound boy, for a pittance. He’s trying to milk you like a cow. Let him know that you know it…and that you won’t let him get away with it.”

My husband nodded soberly. “I won’t let him. Beloved, I knew what he was trying to do. But I had to think of you and our children.”

“You do. You will. You always have.”

Brian came home early the next day, carrying a battered Oliver typewriter. He put it down and kissed me. “Madam, I have joined the ranks of the unemployed.”

“Really? Oh, goodie!”

“I am an ungrateful wretch. I am no better than a Wobbly and I probably am one. He has treated me like his own son, his own flesh and blood. And now I do this to him. Smith, get out of here! Leave these premises; I don’t want to see your face again. Don’t you dare take even a piece of paper out of this office. You are through as a mining consultant; I’m going to let the whole mining community know how thoroughly unreliable, completely undependable, utterly ungrateful you are.”

“Doesn’t he owe you some salary?”

“Salary and two weeks notice and earned participation in that Silver Plume Colorado deal. I declined to budge until he paid up. He did, reluctantly, with more comments on my character.” Briney sighed. “Mo’, it upset me to listen to what he said. But I feel relieved, too. Free, for the first time in more than six years.”

“Let me draw you a tub. Then dinner in your robe and then to bed. Poor Briney! I love you, sir.”

My sewing room became an office and we installed a Bell telephone in addition to our Home instrument and put the two side by side near my typewriter. Our letterhead carried both numbers and a post office box number. I kept a baby bed in there and a couch I used for quick naps. Mr. Fones’s animosity did not seem to hurt us, and it may have helped simply by emphasizing that Brian was no longer working for Davis and Fones—a fact Brian advertised in all the trade journals. My first job with the typewriter was to write to about 150 people and/or firms, announcing that Brian Smith Associates was now in business…and announcing a new policy.

“The idea is, Mo’, that I am betting on my own judgment. I’ll confer with anyone, first visit free, here in Kansas City. If I travel, it’s my railroad ticket, two dollars a night for a hotel room, three dollars a day for food, costs such as livery stable rents as required by the survey, plus per diem consulting fee…all in advance. In advance because I saw while working for Mr. Fones how nearly impossible it is to get a client to pay for a dead horse. Fones did it by refusing to budge until he had a retainer in hand equal to his projected expenses, applied overhead, and expected minimum profit…more, if he could squeeze it out.

“It’s on that per diem that I’ll differ in my methods from Davis and Fones. I will use a formal, signed contract, with two options, the client to make his choice ahead of time. Forty dollars a day—”

“What!!”

But Briney had spoken seriously. “Mr. Fones charged a client that much for my services. My dear, there are plenty of lawyers who get paid that much per diem for nice clean work in a warm courtroom. I want to be paid at that rate for trudging and sloshing and sometimes crawling through mines that are always cold and usually wet. For that price they’ll get my best professional judgment as to how much it will cost to work that mine, including capital investment required before they ship their first ton of ore…and my best guess, based on assays, geology, and other factors, as to whether or not the claim can be worked at a profit…for it is a sad fact that, in the mining business as a whole, more money goes into the ground than ever is taken out.

“That’s the business I’m in, Mo’. Not in mining. I get paid for telling people not to mine. To cut their losses and run. They often don’t believe me, which is why I must insist on being paid in advance.

“But once in a while I have had the happy privilege of telling someone, ‘Go ahead, do it! It will cost you this big wad of money…but you should get it all back and more.’

“And that is where the second option comes in, the one I really prefer. Under the second option I gamble with the client. I lower my per diem and instead take some points on the net, if and when. I won’t take more than five points at most, and I won’t do a field survey for less than expenses plus a per diem of fifteen dollars a day, minimum. That bracket leaves room to dicker.

“Now—Can you write a model letter for me, explaining the tariff schedule? How they can have our best work, at our standard fee. Or we’ll gamble with them at a much lower fee, and they will still have our best work.”

“I’ll try, Mister Boss Man, sir.”

It paid. It made us rich. But I did not suspect how well it paid until forty years later when circumstances caused my husband and me to count up all our assets and figure their worth. But that is forty years later and this account may not go on that long.

It paid especially well through an oddity of human psychology…or an oddity of persons seized by the mining mania, which may not be the same thing. Like this—

The compulsive gamblers, the sort who try to beat lotteries or slot machines or other house games, almost always were betting on striking it rich on some claim that could not be worked at a profit. Each of these saw himself as another Cowboy Womack…and did not want to share his lucky star with some hireling, even at only five points. So, if he could scrape it up, he paid the full fee, grumbling.

After a survey (when I was my husband’s secretary) I would prepare a letter along these lines, telling this optimist that his best vein was “—surrounded by country rock that has to be dug out to get at the high grade. The mine cannot be worked successfully without drifting a new tunnel out to the north to the highway, through a right of way still to be negotiated via the third level of the claim to the north of yours.

“In addition, your claim requires a blacksmithy, a tool repair shop, a new pumping system, new ties and rails for approximately two hundred yards of track, etc., etc.—plus wages for eighty shifts per month as required by the bond-and-lease for an estimated three years before appreciable pay tonnage could be taken to the mill, etc., etc., see enclosures A, B, and C.

“In view of the state of the claim and the capital investment required to work it, we regret to have to report that we recommend against attempting to work this claim.

“We agree with your arithmetic as to the effect on the commercial feasibility of processing low-grade ore if the new Congress does in fact pass legislation requiring free and unlimited coinage of silver at sixteen to one. But we are not as sanguine as you are that such legislation will indeed pass.

“We are forced to recommend that you sell your bond-and-lease for whatever it will bring. Or cut your losses and surrender it.

This report was typical for an old claim being reopened by a new optimist—the commonest situation in mining. (The West is pocked with holes where some prospector ran out of money and luck.)

I wrote many letters like that one. They hardly ever believed unfavorable reports. They frequently demanded their money back. Then a client often took the bit in his teeth and went ahead anyhow…and went broke trying to satisfy a bond-and-lease on country rock assaying only enough silver per ton to go broke on, plus a trace of platinum and a whiff of gold.

The clients attempting to mine gold were even worse. There is something about gold that has an effect on human judgment similar to that of heroin or cocaine.

But there were also a few rational investors—gamblers, but gambling the odds correctly. Offered a chance to reduce up-front expenses in exchange for points, they often took that option…and the claims selected by these more level-headed people were more likely to merit a go-ahead from Brian.

Even these worthwhile mining claims usually lost money in the long run, through failure of their owners/operators to shut down soon enough when the operations stopped paying their costs. (Brian did not lose when that happened; he simply stopped making money from his percentage of the net.) But some of them made money and some of them made lots of money and some of them were still making money regularly forty years later. Brian’s willingness to postpone his return other than a modest fee put our children into the best schools and Brian’s quondam secretary, Mama Maureen, into big, fat emeralds. (I don’t like diamonds. Too cold.)

I see that I’ve missed telling about Nelson and Betty Lou and Random Numbers and Mr. Renwick. That’s what comes of being a Time Corps operative; all times look alike to you, and temporal sequence becomes unimportant. All right, let’s fill in.

Random Numbers may have been the silliest cat I’ve ever lived with—although all cats are sui generis, and Pixel has his supporters for the title of funniest cat, unlimited, all times, all universes. But I’m sure Betty Lou would vote for Random Numbers. Theoretically title to Random lay in Brian, since the cat was his bride’s wedding present to him, somewhat delayed. But it is silly to talk of title to a cat, and Randie felt that Betty Lou was his personal slave, available at all hours to scratch his skull, cuddle him, and open doors for him, a conviction she supported by her slavish obedience to his tiniest whim.

Betty Lou was Brian’s favorite sweetheart for, oh, pretty steadily for three years, then as circumstances brought them together for years and years. Betty Lou was Nelson’s wife, Nelson being my cousin who played fast and loose with a lemon meringue pie. My past had come back to haunt me.

Nelson showed up in December of 1906, shortly after Brian had decided to strike out on his own. Brian had met Nelson once, at our wedding, and neither of us had seen him since that day.

He had been fifteen then, no taller than I; now he was a tall, handsome young man of twenty-three, who had earned a master’s degree in agronomy at Kansas State University, Manhattan…and was as charming as ever, or more so. I felt that old tingle deep inside me and those cold lightnings at the base of my spine. I said to myself, Maureen, as a dog returneth to its vomit, you are in trouble. The only thing protecting you is that you are seven months gone, big as a house, and as seductive as a Poland China sow. Tell Briney in bed tonight and get him to keep a close eye on you.

Big help! Nelson showed up in the afternoon, Brian invited him to stay for dinner. When he learned that Nelson had not checked into a hotel, he invited Nelson to stay overnight. That was to be expected; at that year and in that part of the country, people never stayed in hotels when homes of kinfolk were at hand. We had had overnighters several times even in our first crackerbox; if you didn’t have a spare bed, you made up a pallet on the floor.

I didn’t say anything to Brian that night. While I was sure that I had told Briney the lemon-pie story, I wasn’t sure that I had mentioned Nelson by name. If I had not—or if Brian had not made the connection—then let sleeping dogs bury their own bones. It was swell to have an understanding and tolerant husband but, Maureen, don’t be a greedy slut! Don’t stir it up again.

Nelson was still there the next day. Brian was his own boss now, but not overwhelmed by clients; he had no need to leave the house that day other than to check our post office box at the Southside substation. Nelson had arrived in an automobile, a smart four-passenger Reo runabout. Nelson offered to drive Brian to the post office.

He offered to take me, too. I was glad that I had the excuse of a little girl—Nancy was at school; Carol at home—and a baby boy not to accept. I had never ridden in an automobile and, to tell the truth, I was scared. Surely, I expected to ride in one someday; I could see a time coming when they would be commonplace. But I was always more timid when I was pregnant, especially toward the end—my worst nightmare concerned miscarriage.

Brian said, “Can’t you get the Jenkins girl to come over for an hour?”

I said, “Thank you, another time, Nelson. Brian, paying for a baby watcher is an unnecessary expense.”

“Penny pincher.”

“I surely am. As your office manager I intend to pinch every penny so hard that the Indian will scream in pain. Go along, gentlemen; I’ll get the breakfast dishes done while you’re out.”