Page:Love Insurance - Earl Biggers (1914).djvu/103

82 arrived several hundred years too soon. He should have waited until the yellow rich from the North showed up here. Then he'd have found his mountain—he'd have found a whole range of them."

"I suppose I'm to infer," Mr. Minot said, "that where he failed, you've landed."

"Yes, Dick. I am right on the mountain with my little alpenstock in hand."

"I'm sorry," replied Minot frankly. "You might have amounted to something if you'd been separated from money long enough."

"So I've heard," Paddock said with a yawn. "But it wasn't to be. I haven't seen you since we left college, have I? Well, Dick, for a couple of years I tried to make good doing fiction. I turned them out by the yard—nice quiet little tea-table yarns with snappy dialogue. Once I got eighty dollars for a story. It was hard work—and I always did yearn for the purple, you know."

"I know," said Minot gravely.

"Well, I've struck it, Dick. I've struck the deep purple with a loud if sickening thud. Hist! The graft I mentioned yesterday." He glanced