High Finance and Pete Hewes



ISS FILOMENA FATE, the goddess lady who rolls snakes’ eyes or sevens as the whim takes her, started out one broiling Nevada day to check up her favorite goat, Pete Hewes. She hadn’t passed the bones to Pete for some time; last occasion was when she prompted him to step into an uncovered mine shaft in the dark and he fell thirty feet. Naturally enough the goddess lady thought her Peter must be suffering for lack of playful companionship.

As Miss Filomena had left Pete in a shaft, so she found him in one. But this happened to be an elevator shaft, wherein the going was up as well as down and very slow in both directions. The elevator shaft speared through all four stories of Carson City’s mammoth skyscraper. Pete was both skipper and crew of the lugger that followed this confined course. And how it irked him, this dragging on a steel rope, this sedate traveling up and down through a square hole away from the sun! He, Peter Hewes, one-time prospector and connoisseur of salted mines, farer through waste places, child of the sun, to be sitting on a dinky stool and saying, “Going up—going down,” from eight to six!

Yet one cannot fall thirty feet down a mine shaft and still remain undisputed master of one’s destiny. Limitations entail.

So Lady Fate sought and found her orphan child and, veiling prankish eyes with her sleeve, began to work on him. Came to Peter’s elevator, resting on the ground floor, one John Blake, mining engineer and scout for the greatest metals syndicate in America. A nice gentle trader in mining prospects, this John Blake, with the kind heart of a shark and all the scruples of a whale swallowing a kindergarten class of weakfish. Over several years he had possessed a hullo-so long acquaintance with our Pete Hewes.

He stepped in. The door clashed. The car started its snails progress upward. Pete was droning some commonplace about how the sun could cook an egg when Blake suddenly interrupted, “Want to make two hundred dollars, Pete?”

Wham! The car stopped with a jerk as Pete threw his callouses against the steel rope. “’Tisn’t the heat that’s got you, Mr. Blake?” anxiously from Pete.

Thin lips under Blake’s hawk nose tried to smile. “Two hundred, with a Prince Albert coat and a high hat thrown in. Yes, and a gold headed cane. Sort of easy, eh, Pete?”

“You don’t mean a reg’lar Comstock hat like the Floods and the Sharons used to wear over to Virginia City in bonanza days?” Deep awe thrilled in Pete’s voice.

“You said it, Pete. And don’t forget the little matter of two hundred.”

The electric buzzer announced an impatient would-be passenger on the fourth floor. “Ring yer head off!” challenged the elevator’s skipper in new found independence. But Blake counseled tolerance, even though fleeting, for the exacting duties of the old job. If Pete would come to see him in his office on the third floor after hours that evening he would learn the exact specifications for a silk hat, gold cane, $200 professional venture.

Wherefore during the remainder of an age long day Miss Filomena Fate’s darling moved in his elevator from one cloud stratum to another. At each was a door looking out to vistas of silk hats, Prince Albert coats and gold canes; and each fluffy bank was tinged with the green of silver certificates.

When the planing mill whistle announced that Pete could run his lugger into safe harbor for the night he was at the third floor tapping on the ground glass bearing the name John Blake before a fly could wink. There he “went into conference”—classy business patter phrase—with the mining engineer, a conference which left the single track mind of Pete Hewes with block signals all awry. For Pete, you see, was not a business man. He knew a great deal more about dips and strikes and free milling ores than he did of contracts, lines and options.

“You say, Mr. Blake, I give this crazy nut whose mine you want to examine my note for a hundred thousand. What for a note, and what’s it mean?” Pete broke into the other’s exposition with childlike innocence. Blake snapped his thread of discourse with a helpless heave of the shoulders and began again in words of one syllable:

“This old cuckoo Lewis has a hole in a mountain he says is worth a million dollars. He writes to my outfit, offering to sell for that figure. They wire me to go and expert the thing; but when I reach the prospect over back of Gold City there’s a fence around the tunnel mouth, a padlocked gate and Lewis himself with a rifle. Nobody gets a look at his million dollar mine, says the crazy old gopher, without first taking a thirty day option for a hundred thousand cash.”

“Not so very crazy at that,” Pete supplied judiciously.

“Crazy enough to give me a lot of grief,” Blake snapped. “I know there’s not enough gold in that whole country to fill a gnat’s tooth. But orders are orders. My outfit tells me to go expert that mine of Lewis’; but they sure wouldn’t relish paying a hundred thousand just to find out the ledge would make good headstones for a graveyard.”

Pete inched himself forward in his chair. “Now ’bout that what-yuh-call-it note,” he insinuated.

“Why, I told Lewis I would come back with my principal, the purchaser I represented, and of course if he was interested he would gladly take an option. You’re going to be that principal.” Pete visibly swelled; he’d heard of mining nabobs but never had seen one. “And when this old stinging lizard Lewis wants to see the color of your money before letting me into his tunnel you're to say”

“Sorry, Mr. Lewis, but I’m clean busted,” Pete supplied with bubbling eagerness.

Blake lifted his eyes to the ceiling with a look to conjure its dropping on the head of the elevator pilot. “No, dammit all! You're a millionaire mine speculator. What ’m I buying you all the gaudy clothes for if not for that? You will say, ‘That’s a lot of money, Mr. Lewis, and I don’t usually carry that amount around with me. But I’ll give you a thirty-day promissory note for $100,000 and that will allow me time, to sell some of my securities in the East.”

“‘Promissory—promissory note.’” Pete turned the unknown phrase over on his tongue. Blake could not suppress a vulpine grin.

“Promise to pay a cold hundred thousand at the end of thirty days,” was his enlightening comment.

“Just fer that I get two hundred ’dobies?” Blake nodded. “And a Prince Willie coat? And a silk beanie? And a gold-headed cane?”

The mining engineer confirmed each item in the specification.

Pete gave him a boy’s grin. “Why, Mr. Blake, fer all that I’d promise to give anybody a long look at my appendix, which I got in an alcohol bottle.”

So a pact was sealed between John Blake, conscientious appraiser of metal prospects, and Peter Hewes, millionaire moth in an elevator chrysalis. Before the Red Front Cash Store closed that night its delighted proprietor had disposed of some old stock hard to move. Item: one Prince Albert coat with appropriate trousers and and white waistcoat; one marked down silk hat which could be made a perfect fit with newspaper folded in the sweatband; one pair of No. 10 patent leather shoes and spats a little moth eaten. A nearby pawnshop yielded a rosewood cane with gold head, ancient and honorable patent to moneyed nobility in Nevada.

I have purposely delayed intimate portraiture of our Peter until such time as the reader should see him at his best—this out of kindly consideration for Peter’s vanity. Behold him then, on the morning following his translation into the moneyed aristocracy and as he steps out of the Fashion Stable’s emeritus hack at the train station.

Beneath the brim of the glossy hat a fringe of white curls and below that features drawn into a solemn mask of importance; features whose desert weathering recent confinement in an elevator has hardly served to erase. The merry blue eyes of him and the comedian’s mouth under that Celtic upper lip frosty white from barbering; these signboards of humor belie his heavy majesty of mien. The frock coat is stretched tight as a drum head between Pete’s husky shoulders, and the tails of it—for Pete was a little man, bandy-legged to boot—flap below the wrinkles at his knees. He walks with a limp, his old limp acquired by the fall down a mine shaft plus stabbing agonies induced by the mirrorlike shoes. Withal a figure to arrest the eye of Carson, Nevada, and calculated to have its weight upon the imagination of the Gold City mine owner down the railroad line.

Pete had a time of it holding his bright headed cane and his satchel in one hand while he burrowed for hack fare with the other. In the melée between hands his hat fell to the gravel. Pete was appalled; but Blake, who had preceded him to the station and now strode up to greet him, quickly retrieved the fallen treasure. He smoothed the ruffled nap on his coat sleeve.

“So that’s the way you shine the durned thing.” Admiration glinted from Pete’s eyes. “I thought you had to have a comb an’ brush.”

The ride to Gold City was a delight to Pete Hewes. He allowed himself to rise to a nabob’s heights of deportment with genuine gusto. Five times in an hour he strode the length of the car aisle to the water cooler—never forgetting his cane. His pace was magnificently dignified; the look of eagles was in his eyes. On one of his trips his toe stubbed against a wicker basket a Chinese passenger had left protruding from his seat space.

“Outrageous Chink!” Pete struck at the offending parcel with his rosewood cane. Fine haughtiness crisped from his tongue. He was the intolerant money lord crushing an earthworm.

Somewhere in the cindered heart of John Blake a little spark of humor flickered up. Perhaps even just a touch of humanity livened that spark. How far a few dollars invested in a junk clothing shop would go in dressing a stage for an old play boy out of an elevator.

Before Gold City was reached Blake undertook final rehearsal of the genteel fraud he hoped to perpetrate. “Now remember, Pete, you are Mr, Hewes of New York, who’s hiring me to make a report on old Lewis’ mine. Nobody from New York would look like you, but you look like what Lewis would expect to come out of New York. Cagey, remember—that’s you.”

“Say, Mr, Blake, this cane’s skewed.” Pete had the rosewood stick out in the aisle with his eye sighting along its polished length. “Somebody let it stand in the sun too long,” he finished with a touch of sadness.

Blake slapped the cane down in exasperation. “What are you going to say when old Lewis holds us up for a hundred thousand?”

Pete knotted his brows under the new red lines stamped there by the silk hat.

“‘That’s quite a sum of money, Mr. Lewis,ʻ I says. ‘I usual packs that amount ’round on my yat; but natchly you can’t expect me to bring a yat-boat into Nevada.’” Pete’s imagination was playing up to the part and Blake, not unpleased, let it ride.

“‘But seein’ it’s you, Mr. Lewis,’ I says, ‘why, I’ll give you my—my—uh’”

“Note for thirty days,” prompted Blake.

“‘Note fer thirty days, signed, sealed and delivered,” Pete finished sonorously.

They found a tall, gangling old man waiting for them at the Eagle House in Gold City, one in whose eyes burned the fanatic fire of the typical searcher after mineral rainbow ends—Lewis. The miner, visibly impressed by Pete’s exotic raiment and the air with which he carried it, acknowledged Blake’s introduction with mumbled embarrassment.

“Mr, Lewis,” quoth Blake in his brisk business manner, “after our last talk about your mine I thought it best to wire to New York and bring my principal, Mr. Hewes, here, out to look over the ground and see if we couldn’t work out a proposition with you that would be mutually satisfactory.”

“He don’t look like a trifler,” was Lewis’ ungrudging tribute. “But my terms is unchanged. A million dollars, an’ no expert sets his foot in my tunnel ’thout I gets first a hundred thousand, cash money in hand for an option.”

“A hundred thousand’s a lot of money to be packin’ ’round, Mr. Lewis,” Pete ventured at the cue to his rôle, then stole a side glance at Blake and read encouragement—and command. Then he threw in the bit about the difficulty in getting his yacht across the mountains to Nevada.

Blake interrupted. “I need not tell you my principal is a very rich man. But men of his class invest their surplus in sound securities, you understand. He would have to dispose of some of them to raise the amount of money you require.”

“Let him dispose.” Old Lewis was adamant.

“But Mr. Hewes can’t stay here until his securities are sold in New York; can you, Mr. Hewes?”

“Some of ’em mightn’t be so damn’ secure,” Pete ventured owlishly. A vicious kick on his shins was his reward. He took the plunge, “Seein’ it’s you, Mr. Lewis, how about my givin’ you my note”

Already Blake’s hand had flashed to his pocket. He laid before the mine owner an eye dazzling document, elaborately decorated with stamps and a gold notary’s seal. It was the note prepared in advance and with Pete’s signature witnessed by Blake, all regular enough except for the implied ability of the signer to meet any obligation over about $2.75.

Old Lewis shared with our Peter an abysmal lack of knowledge concerning business paper. Never had he seen a promissory note. Perhaps he’d heard of gold notes and U.S. Treasury certificates. This ostentatious bit of paper with its ink flourishes and great gold seal qualified in that class most likely. After a few more honeyed words from Blake the owner of the dream bonanza reluctantly consented to pocket the paper.

“Don’t know’s I’m so anxious to put this deal through at that,” he mumbled vaguely. “T’other day I run across a stringer which sure’s goin’ to cross the main ledge; an’ if she do I ought to get five million fer my property.”

Blake, avid of bringing the whole farce to a close, assured the old man the matter of price could be adjusted after he’d given the mine a complete survey. The business irked him. He was certain before ever he stepped foot in Lewis’ tunnel that the old prospect hunter had nothing worth buying, yet because the head office had commanded a report from him he must go through with this clowning. Perhaps Blake felt keen regret that the subterfuge centering about the exalted Pete Hewes was to yield nothing but a barren report. He was not a man given to killing fleas with a pile-driver,

A dusty ride through sagebrush in a livery rig brought the three to the fenced and padlocked Sadie Queen. Old Lewis was trembling with suppressed excitement when he let them through the gate of the stockade. Once again he complained that he’d been too hasty in accepting an option on a million dollar basis.

“Why, gents,” he whined, “I got the straightest tunnel in all Nevada. Openin’ up is all done. Timberin’ neat as the floor of a hotel.”

Blake gave a searching look at the dump below the tunnel mouth. He stood and picked up several bits of chalky white bull quartz. Worthless! While Pete sat on a dynamite box in the shadowed tunnel entrance Blake followed the owner down the slender track into obscurity. The candles his guide lighted and set in neatly carved niches along the wall revealed the full measure of old Lewis’ self delusion. The tunnel was like the corridor of a hotel done in white marble, beautifully neat. But that was its only recommendation. Of precious metal there was not a trace!

The engineer chipped off a few bits from the ledge at the tunnel’s end just to fill the requirements of his rôle, then announced himself as satisfied. With an indefinite promise, “Hear from us before thirty days are up,” he drove off with Pete Hewes.

What time Blake and Lewis were in the tunnel Pete, on his dynamite box and with his silk hat and cane placed on a clean rock beside him, had been doing some high pressure thinking. What was he going to do now that his job of being a New York millionaire was nearing the end of its tenure? Go back to Carson and try to get his elevator job back again?. The thought smote him hard under the interlocked horseshoes on his linen waistcoat; it sickened him. With $200—Blake had paid him before they left Carson—and all these high-’n’-lofty clothes, why go back to Carson at all?

He’d been playing at this millionaire business; by the ring-tailed rinkytink, now he’d keep right on being one while the two hundred held out to burn!

“Think if you’re through with me, Mr. Blake, I’ll take a li’l pasear down to Brigham City and look ’em over.” This from Pete at the station where Blake was waiting for the down train to Carson.

“All right, Pete. You’ve nothing to worry about for thirty days.” Blake gave him his best twisted smile, which could poison an ant-eater. Pete stared his perplexity.

“Because at the end of thirty days old Lewis’ll be looking you up to collect his hundred thousand,” the engineer threw in for a knockout.

“But you don’t mean, Mr. Blake, that old kangaroo rat thinks he can get a hundred thousand off of me?” Pete’s surprise registered itself in a thin shriek.

“Your name at the bottom of that promissory note he holds says he can,” was Blake’s happy reassurance. “Good-by, Pete, and don’t sign your name again—not even on a hotel register!”

The train whisked Blake out into the desert, leaving Peter Hewes, silk hat in one hand and the fingers of the other rubbing the new red marks on his forehead.

“By golly, I never thought of that,” said he to the station master’s setter dog.

RIGHAM CITY, newest boom town in Nevada, pointed with pride to three ultra-modern conveniences—a stock ticker, a revolving door on the President House, and a manicure parlor. One seeking excitement could take a whirl at all three and still live to boast about it. An air of hectic excitement pervaded the place. Even the dogs scratched fleas with a hind leg so galvanic as to blur the vision of an interested onlooker.

Pete Hewes, his hat at a daring angle and his gold headed cane swinging on a wide arc, descended from the hotel bus, negotiated the revolving door of the hotel and approached the desk with an air commensurate with the spirit of the welcoming brass band which was not at the station to meet him. He signed the register, “C. Peter Hewes, Capitalist, New York”; the “C” was a happy inspiration of the moment, giving class to the somewhat ordinary “Peter” his sponsors in baptism had pinned upon a helpless infant.

“With bath, Mr. Hewes?” The clerk patted his cowlick as he gave Peter a survey filled with approval.

“Haven’t missed a Saturday night in three months,” was our Peter’s ready answer; then to himself, “Fresh young rooster! What’s it to him, anyhow.”

In his room and over the unpacking of his bag—a corkscrew, three plugs of chewing tobacco and extra socks—the capitalist out of an elevator could not keep his mind from reverting to a matter which had largely occupied it on the run down to Brigham City. That $100,000 promissory note; how about it? S’posin’ at the end of thirty days that old gopher Lewis really began to camp on his trail and try to collect. Could he rely on Blake’s helping him out? Fat chance! Well then?

Peter happened to catch a reflection of his face in the bureau mirror just that instant when perplexity was deepest. He studied the picture in the glass with a curiously detached interest. Silk hat pushed far back from a furrowed forehead; lines of strain about the corners of shrewd but honest eyes; long upper lip pulled down in intensity of thought—why say, that’s just the way a reg’lar capitalist would look if he was worried! And a reg’lar capitalist might worry about a $100,000 promissory note, too!

Pete tried out the effect in detail. He paced away from the glass and turned. He took a step toward the bureau, halted, tucked his cane under an arm, and with a sweep of his free hand tipped back the hat to give his silk handkerchief free play for a swabbing run over the forehead. All the time his features were set in sternest concentration; aye, with just a touch of melancholy about the corners of the mouth.

“Of course, us capitalists invests our surplus in sound securities,” said Peter to Peter; “and we has to—ah—dispose of some of ’em when a promissory note fer a hundred thousand comes due. Damn nuisance!”

Peter liked this touch. It had its values. If a New York capitalist in a silk hat and Prince Albert possessed any circus virtue in the eyes of Brigham City, then a worried New York capitalist would be all the more distinguished.

He tried out his double barrelled swank on the hotel lobby just at the dinner rush hour when all the agile dollar chasers of the boom town were trooping to the dining room. Came to him the hotel manager, who thought he knew a big fish when he saw one. “Nothing wrong with your service, Mr. Hewes?” he fawningly insinuated. “You look sort of put out.”

“Oh, no—no.” Peter sighed prodigiously and tipped back his hat with that practiced gesture of weariness. “Just a little business matter on my mind—away from my office, you know—securities”

“But we have a quotation wire direct from New York, Mr. Hewes,” The manager brightened. “Just across the street in the office of”

“Won’t do me any good,” mournfully from Peter, who didn’t know whether a quotation wire was something from a book of grammar or a new fangled radio. Then with a sudden access of man-to-man confidence: “Y’see, it’s a little matter of a hundred thousand on a promissory note. Got to dispose of some securities, of course, and

The manager had darted across the room and returned with a florid man in a linen suit tightly noosed by the arm. “Mr. C. Peter Hewes, shake hands with Jim Holman, president of our new Chamber of Commerce. Jim here’ll go a long way to do anything for a stranger in Brigham City, particularly for a man like yourself, Mr. Hewes.”

Just as easily as that! High hat, frock coat, gold-headed cane: these accessories plus a worried look and an ingenuous confession of temporary mortification over a $100,000 obligation, and Pete Hewes found himself taken to the heart of Brigham City.

The tip passed with the speed of light: “He owes a hundred thousand. Ye-ah, that little feller in the Wall Street rig; he says himself he owes a hundred thousand on a note.”

Brigham City and its boom were builded on just such dream stuff. In the fine frenzy of mining excitement thereabouts men were rated not on what they had but on what they owed. Promises to pay printed on the face of U. S. Treasury certificates were not nearly so common as similar promises scribbled on the backs of old envelopes.

In the delighted eye of Brigham City Pete Hewes was a` hundred thousand dollar man.

Witness our Peter, then, sprawled at his ease in the office of the Chamber of Commerce, hat cocked at a grand angle, cigar in teeth; about him men restive on the edges of their chairs—men with mines and stock in mines to sell. Here was he who but a short week before was saying, “Going up—going down,” kinging it over all the hungry speculators of Brigham City!

Peter watched his step with unremitting vigilance. Mines he could talk with the best of them. He knew all the passwords and signs in the fellowcraft of wildcatting. While conversation on Brigham City’s burning topic remained general he led it; but when some curly wolf with a hungry eye began insinuating purchases of bonanza properties Peter fell back upon his first happy inspiration. There was a little matter of a $100,000 note to be met; until that was done he could not be in the market.

The days passed snappily for Pete. What though he would not rise to any of the baits held out in confidential behind-the-hand whispers, his stock appreciated by very virtue of that reticence. No sucker, this wise one from Wall Street! Deep, that’s what he was!

Not long before men commenced to come to him for advice on what to buy and what to sell. He was asked to go out into the sagebrush and look at certain prospects, to give expert opinions on technical aspects of shaft and stope. And Pete was qualified to do just that. Before the prankish Miss Fate let him step down an abandoned shaft he had been a first rate miner of the unschooled desert type; one who could smell gold in a garlic patch.

One riotous week of playing up to the part. At the end of it Pete settled his hotel bill in good gold, retired to his room and stripped himself to his money belt. He counted the dwindling fresco of double eagles in the canvas pockets and then looked at the calendar on the wall. Seven from thirty left twenty-three. At the end of the twenty-third day how ’bout that crazy old gopher Lewis and the note for $100,000?

What was more, his silk hat was wearing out with too much bumping against mine timbers. And his bright-headed cane had got nicked in the hotel’s revolving door.

Wasn’t it hell the way just when a feller got to goin’ good something was waiting round the corner to snatch him bald headed?

It was with this dour fit on him that Pete was slumped down in a lobby chair absently watching the revolving glass panels in the door. He saw a shambling dusty figure under a wide brimmed hat negotiate the stile and approach the desk with a hesitant air. At a question the clerk scanned the lobby and, seeing Pete, jerked his head to point where he sat. As the stranger approached our elevator hero got a start.

This gaunt old desert rat with the sun bleached eyes was one who not a month before had haunted the Carson office building housing Blake’s place of business. A dozen times or more Peter had lifted him to the third floor; he even had commiserated him on his hard luck in not finding the mining expert in.

If this old tad should recognize the face of an elevator operator under the brim of a tile! “Mr, Hewes,” the stranger began in a quavering whine, “I bin recommended to see you about a proposition—a mine proposition.”

Pete sighed his relief; he hadn’t been recognized. “I know too much about mines to buy any.” He brusquely re-established himself in the rôle so perilously endangered. The desert man gave him a weak smile and an appeal from doglike eyes.

“You ain’t seen the mine I got yet, Mr. Hewes. I bin tryin’ to get on the trail of a man named Blake down t’ Carson. Just don’t seem like I can catch him. So I heard of you an’ how you might be on the lookout fer a likely property. If you an’ me could go somewhere”—the old prospector cast a look of distaste around the crowded lobby—“somewhere alone, you might say, I got some right smart samples to show.”

Three minutes later the stranger and Pete were behind a locked door in the latter’s room. A make-believe New York capitalist had flown out the window; in his place stood Pete Hewes, practical mine swapper, smeller of gold. He lifted to his tongue and then held close to his eyes bit after bit of white quartz from which the free gold oozed like honey from the comb.

“I’ll give your prospect a look,” finally he said, trying to blunt with a tone of casualness the shake of excitement in his voice. The gouts of gold in those chunks of quartz filled the whole room, all of Brigham City with a glory!

FTER nightfall the loungers in the lobby of the President House saw something to confirm their belief that C. Peter Hewes was a man of weighty affairs. A car stopped before the door; out of it tumbled the great man himself. He gave himself half a merry-go-round ride in the revolving door and developed a high burst of speed for the telephone desk.

“Gimme John Blake, Carson City! Quick, sister—quick!”

The important Mr. Hewes, dust covered, silk hat coated with mine slickings, shoes white with the drippings of shaft water, paced the lobby in dreadful impatience. Finally at a word from a bobbed blonde he dived into a telephone booth. What the blonde heard she later told her sweetie, the soda water jerker in the drug-store, and he told Brigham City:

“Mr. Blake, this’s Pete Hewes—ye-ah Hewes! Glory be, I got you, Mr. Blake! Grab a car an’ step on her an’ make Brigham City by morning!

“A mine, that’s what I got. Biggest thing in Nevada! Will run eighteen hundred to two thousand a ton, free milling

“How come? Well, I guess you buy it off of me, Mr. Blake. I’m learnin’ something about this note business. Ye-ah, I give the bird my promissory note fer a hundred thousand—thirty day option. Oh, I’m good at that note stuff.

“How’s that? W-h-a-t! You say that crazy gopher Lewis come to see you an’ tore up my other thirty-dayer? Didn't want to sell at any price? Well, glory be, Mr. Blake!

“Looks like when you buy this option off of me I can meet this second promissory business reg’lar-like and still have a coupla hundred thousand to the good.

“Me, I’m the ringtail’dest capitalist y’ ever see, Mr. Blake!”