Page:Melville Davisson Post--The Man of Last Resort.djvu/271

Rh The two men arose and passed out of the club.

The life of Jerry Van Meter had been crowded with events quite as varied and rapid of incident as that of Sinbad the Sailor. His parents, who resided on a small farm near Rufus Alshire's estate, had died when the child Jerry was quite an infant, and the huge grazier had assumed the guardianship of the youth. Under his direction the boy had been educated, and finally installed as a bank clerk in one of the small towns. But the spirit of adventure was big in the breast of the youthful Jerry, and one morning he closed the ledger carefully and vanished into the Northwest. Here he pulled teeth for an itinerant dentist, drummed for a soap house, and travelled with a circus. But he had a fortunate star, not at all times obscured; and when the boom struck St. Paul, Jerry drifted in, bought far and wide, and carried out with him ten thousand dollars in gold, which he promptly dropped in a bucket-shop in Chicago. A letter to the good genius Alshire brought a check for one hundred dollars and nine pages of advice.