I'm going to look after options right away. I'm glad now I had
already decided to stay another two weeks."
Of course she was still angry with Sam, she reminded herself, but she
was inexpressibly glad, somehow or other, to find that he was intending
to stay two weeks longer, and was startled as she recognized that fact.
"It will take a lot of money, won't it, to build a hotel here?" she
asked, getting away from certain troublesome thoughts as quickly as she
could.
"Yes, it will take a great deal," he admitted, as they turned to
scramble down the ravine again. "I should judge, however, that about
two hundred and fifty thousand dollars would finance it."
"But I thought, from something father once said, that you did not have
so much money as that?"
"Bless you, no!" replied Sam, smiling. "No indeed! I've enough to
cover an option on this property and that's about all, now, since I'm
tangled up so deeply with my Pulp Company, but I figure that I can make
a quick turn on this property to help me out on the other thing. What
I'll do," he explained, "is to get this option first of all, and then
have some plans drawn, including a nice perspective view of the
hotel--a water-color sketch, you know, showing the building fronting
the lake--and upon that build a prospectus to get up the stock company.
I'll take stock for my control of the land and for my services in
promotion. Then I'll sell my stock and get out. I ought to make the
turn in two or three months and come out fifteen, or possibly twenty or
twenty-five thousand dollars to the good. It is a nice, big scheme."
"Oh," she said blankly, "then you wouldn't actually build a hotel
yourself?"
"Hardly," he returned. "I'll be content to make the profit out of
promoting it that I'd make in the first four or five years of running
the place."
"I see," she said musingly; "and you'd get this up just like you formed
your Marsh Pulp Company, I think father called it, and of course you'd
try to get--what is it?--oh, yes; control."
He smiled at her.
"I'd scarcely look for that in this deal," he explained. "If I can
just get a nice slice of promotion stock and sell it I shall be quite
well satisfied."
She bent puzzled brows over this new problem.
"I don't quite understand how you can do it," she confessed, "but of
course you know how. You're used to these things. Father says you're
very good at promoting."
"That's the way I've made all my money, or
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