s, to grab a pot of gold for them! It makes my
fist double up when I think about it.

And I wouldn't be put off or placated by a chance to fatten my own bank
roll. I didn't care if I broke the Free Gold Mining Company and myself
likewise. A dollar doesn't terrify nor yet fascinate me--I hope it
never will. And while, perhaps, it was not what they would call good
form for me to lose my temper and go at them with my fists, I was
fighting mad when I thoroughly sensed their dirty project. Anyway, it
helped bring them to time. When you take a man of that type and cuff
him around with your two hands he's apt to listen serious to what you
say. And they listened when I told them in dead earnest next day that
Whitey Lewis and his partners must have what was due them, or I'd wreck
the bunch of them if it took ten years and every dollar I had to do it.
And I could have put them on the tramp, too--they'd already dipped
their fingers in where they couldn't stand litigation. I'm sure of
that--or they would never have come through; which they did.

But I'm sorry I ever got mixed up with them. I'm going to sell my
stock and advise Lewis and the others to do the same while we can get
full value for it. Lorimer and that bunch will manipulate the outfit
to death, no matter how the mine produces. They'll have a quarter of a
million to work on pretty soon, and they'll work it hard. They're
shysters--but it's after all only a practical demonstration of the
ethics of the type--"Do everybody you can--if you can do 'em so there's
no come-back."

That's all of that. I don't care two whoops about the money. There is
still gold in the Klappan Range and other corners of the North,
whenever I need it. But it nauseated me. I can't stand that cutthroat
game. And Granville, like most other cities of its kind, lives by and
for that sort of thing. The pressure of modern life makes it
inevitable. Anyway, a town is no place for me. I can stomach it about
so long, and no longer. It's too cramped, too girded about with
petty-larceny conventions. If once you slip and get down, every one
walks on you. Everything's restricted, priced, tinkered with. There
is no real freedom of body or spirit. I wouldn't trade a comfy log
cabin in the woods with a big fireplace and a shelf of books for the
finest home on Maple Drive--not if I had to stay there and stifle in
the dust and smoke and smells. That would be a sordid and impoverished
existe