Dave rode back to town.

CHAPTER XXVIII

DAVE MEETS A FINANCIER

On more careful consideration Crawford and Sanders decided against trying
to float the Jackpot with local money except by the sale of enough stock
to keep going until the company's affairs could be put on a substantial
basis. To apply to the Malapi bank for a loan would be to expose their
financial condition to Steelman, and it was certain that he would permit
no accommodation except upon terms that would make it possible to wreck
the company.

"I'm takin' the train for Denver to-morrow, Dave," the older man said.
"You stay here for two-three days and sell enough stock to keep us off
the rocks, then you hot-foot it for Denver too. By the time you get there
I'll have it all fixed up with the Governor about a pardon."

Dave found no difficulty in disposing of a limited amount of stock in
Malapi at a good price. This done, he took the stage for the junction and
followed Crawford to Denver. An unobtrusive little man with large white
teeth showing stood in line behind him at the ticket window. His
destination also, it appeared, was the Colorado capital.

If Dave had been a believer in fairy tales he might have thought himself
the hero of one. A few days earlier he had come to Malapi on this same
train, in a day coach, poorly dressed, with no job and no prospects in
life. He had been poor, discredited, a convict on parole. Now he wore
good clothes, traveled in a Pullman, ate in the diner, was a man of
consequence, and, at least on paper, was on the road to wealth. He would
put up at the Albany instead of a cheap rooming-house, and he would meet
on legitimate business some of the big financial men of the West. The
thing was hardly thinkable, yet a turn of the wheel of fortune had done
it for him in an hour.

The position in which Sanders found himself was possible only because
Crawford was himself a financial babe in the woods. He had borrowed large
sums of money often, but always from men who trusted him and held his
word as better security than collateral. The cattleman was of the
outdoors type to whom the letter of the law means little. A debt was a
debt, and a piece of paper with his name on it did not make payment any
more obligatory. If he had known more about capital and its methods of
finding an outlet, he would never have sent so unsophisticated a man as
Dave Sanders on such a mission.

For Dave, too, was a child in the business world. H