Page:Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to His Son.djvu/282

Rh of my old friend Hank Smith and his wife Kate—Kate Botts she was before he married her—and how they tried to butt their way through the upper crust.

Hank and I were boys together in Missouri, and he stayed along in the old town after I left. I heard of him on and off as tending store a little, and farming a little, and loafing a good deal. Then I forgot all about him, until one day a few years ago when he turned up in the papers as Captain Henry Smith, the Klondike Gold King, just back from Circle City, with a million in dust and anything you please in claims. There's never any limit to what a miner may be worth in those, except his imagination.

I was a little puzzled when, a week later, my office boy brought me a card reading; Colonel Henry Augustus Bottes-Smythe, but I supposed it was some distinguished foreigner who had come to size me up so that he could round out his roast on