The Law Of Hemlock Mountain Part 6

"You are indeed introducing me to some one I haven't known," he said.

"I know, too," went on Snowdon, "that there has been a girl--and," he hastened to add as his companion stiffened, "I mention her only to show you that my observations have not been _too_ superficial. Those qualities which I have catalogued have engaged my attention, because they are rare--rare enough to be profitably capitalized."

"All this is parable to me, sir."

"Quite probably. I mean to construe it. There are men who originate or discover great opportunities of industry--and they need capital to bring their plans to fruition--but capital can be approached only through envoys and will receive only amba.s.sadors who can compel recognition. The man who can hope to be successfully accredited to the court of Big Money must possess uncommon attributes. Pinch-beck promoters and plausible charlatans have made cynics of our lords of wealth."

"What would such a man accomplish," inquired Spurrier, "aside from a sort of non-resident members.h.i.+p in the a.s.sociation of plutocrats?"

"He would," declared Snowdon promptly, "help bridge the chasm between the world's unfinanced achievers, and its unachieving finances."

"That," conceded the ex-soldier, "would be worth the doing."

"John Law at twenty-one built a scheme of finance for Great Britain,"

the engineer reminded him. "He could come into the presence of a king and in five minutes the king would urge him to stay. Force and presence can make such an amba.s.sador, and those things are the veins of human ore I've a.s.sayed in you in paying quant.i.ties."

Spurrier looked across at the strange companion whom chance had thrown across his path with a commotion of pulses which his face in no wise mirrored into outward expression. It had begun to occur to him that if a man is born for an adventurous life even the Articles of War cannot cancel his destiny.

"It would seem," he suggested casually enough, "that this need of which you speak is for fellows, in finance, who can carry the message to Garcia, as it were. Isn't that it?"

"That's it, and messengers to Garcia don't tramp on each other's heels. Yet I have spoken of only one phase of the career I'm outlining. It has another side to it as well, if one man is going to unite in himself the whole of the possibility."

Snowdon broke off there a moment and seemed to be distracted by some thought of his own, but presently he began again.

"My hypothetical man would act largely as a free lance, knocking about the world on a sort of constantly renewed exploration. He would be the prospector hunting gold and the explorer searching for new continents of industrial development, only instead of being just the one or the other he would be a sort of sublimation. His job would sometimes call him into the wildernesses, but more often, I think, his discoveries would lie under the noses of crowds, pa.s.sed by every day by clever folk who never saw them--clever folk who are not quite clever enough."

"It would seem to me that those discoveries," demurred Spurrier thoughtfully, "would come each time to some highly trained technician in some particular line."

Snowdon shook his head again. "That's why they have come slowly heretofore," he declared with conviction. "That man I have in mind is one with a sure nose for the trail and a power of absorbing readily and rapidly what he requires of the other man's technical knowledge.

It's the policy that j.a.pan has followed as a nation. They let others work the problems out over there--then they appropriate the results.

I'm not commending it as a national trait, but for this work it's the first essential. Having made his discovery, this new type of business man will enlist for it the needful financial support." He paused again and Spurrier, lighting a fresh cigarette, regarded him through eyes slit-narrowed against the flare of the match.

"He must be a sort of opportunity hound," continued Snowdon smilingly.

"He would go baying across the world in full cry and come back to the kennel at the end of each chase."

Spurrier laughed. "If you'll pardon me, sir," he hazarded, "you make a very bad metaphor. I should fancy that the opportunity hound would do the stillest sort of still hunting."

The older man smiled and bowed his head affirmatively.

"I accept the amendment. The point is, do I give you the concept of the work?"

"In a broad, extremely sketchy way, I think I get the picture,"

replied Spurrier. "But could you give me some sort of ill.u.s.tration that would make it a shade more concrete?"

His companion sat considering the question for a while and at last inquired: "Do you know anything about oil? I mean about its production?"

"I've been on the Pennsylvania Railroad, coming west," testified the former lieutenant. "And I've run through ragged hills where on every side, stood clumsy, timber affairs like overgrown windmills from which some victorious Don Quizote had knocked off the whirligigs. Then I've read a little of Ida Tarbell."

"Even that will serve for a sort of background. Now, people in general think of striking oil as they might think of finding money on the sidewalk or of lightning striking a particular spire--as a matter of purest chance. To some extent that idea is correct enough, but the brains of oil production are less haphazard. In the office of a few gentlemen who hold dominion over oil and gas hangs a map drawn by the intelligence department of their general staff. On that map are traced lines not unlike those showing ocean currents, but their arrows point instead to currents far under ground, where runs the crude petroleum, discovered--and undiscovered."

"Undiscovered?" Spurrier's brows were lifted in polite incredulity, but his companion nodded decisively.

"Discovered and undiscovered," he repeated. "Geological surveys told the mapmakers how certain lines and structures ran in tendency. Where went a particular formation of Nature's masonry, there in probability would go oil. The method was not absolute, I grant you, but neither was it haphazard. Sitting in an office in Pittsburgh a certain man drew on his chart what has since been recognized as the line of the forty-second degree, running definitely from the Pennsylvania fields down through Ohio and into the Appalachian hills of Kentucky--thence west and south. Study your fields in Oklahoma, in old Mexico, and you will find that, widely separated as they are, each of them is marked by a cross on that map, and that each of them lies along the current trend which the Pittsburgh man traced before many of them were touched by a drill."

"That, surely," argued Spurrier, "testifies for the highly skilled technician, doesn't it?"

"So far. I now come to the chance of the opportunity hound. The present fields are spots of production here and there. Between them lie others, virgin to pump or rig. Much of that ground is, of course, barren territory, for even on an acre of proven location dry holes may lie close to gushers; one man's farm may be a 'duster' while his neighbor's spouts black wealth. But along that charted line run the probabilities."

Into Spurrier's eyes stole the gleam of the adventuring spirit that was strong in him.

"It sounds like Robert Louis Stevenson and buried treasure," he declared with unconcealed enthusiasm, but Snowdon only smiled.

"Remember," he cautioned, "I'm ill.u.s.trating--nothing more. Now in the foothills of the Kentucky c.u.mberlands, for example, some years ago men began finding oil. It lay for the most part in a country where the roads were creek beds--remote from railway facilities. It was an expensive sort of proposition to develop, but the cry of 'Oil! Oil!'

has never failed to set the pack a-running, and it ran."

"I don't remember hearing of that rush," admitted Spurrier.

"No, I dare say you didn't. It was a flare-up and a die-down. The men who rushed in, plodded dejectedly out again, poorer by the time they had spent."

"Then the boom collapsed?"

"It collapsed--but why? Because the gentlemen who hold dominion over oil and gas caucussed and so ordained. They gathered around their map and stuck pins here and there. They said, 'This oil can come out in two ways only: by pipe line or tank cars. We will stand aloof and develop where the cost is less and the profit greater--and without us, it cannot succeed.'"

"Were there no independent concerns to bring the stuff to market?"

Snowdon laughed. "The gentlemen who hold dominion have their own defenses against compet.i.tion. You may have heard of a certain dog in the manger? Well, they said as they sat about their table on which the map was spread, 'Some day other fields may run out. Some day something may set oil soaring until even this yield may be well worth our attention. We will therefore hold this card in reserve against that day and that contingency.' So quietly, inconspicuously, yet with a power that strangled compet.i.tion, lobbies operated in State legislatures. The independents failed to secure needful charters--the lines were never laid. Those particular fields starved, and now the ignorant mountaineers who woke for a while to dreams of wealth, laugh at the man who says 'oil' to them. Yet at some properly, or improperly designated day, those failure fields will flash on the astonished world as something risen from the dead, and fortunes will blossom for the lucky."

"Yes?" prompted the listener.

"Now let us suppose our opportunity hound as willing to go unostentatiously into that country; as willing to spend part of each year there for a term of years; nipping options here and there, waiting patiently and watching his chance to slip a charter through one of those bound and gagged legislatures in some moment of relaxed vigilance. Such a man might find himself ultimately standing with the key to the situation in his own hand. It's just a story, but perhaps it serves to give you my meaning."

"Did I understand you to suggest," inquired Spurrier with a forced calmness, "that you fancy you see in me the qualities of your opportunity hound?"

"Our own concern," said Snowdon quietly, "is fortunate enough to have pa.s.sed through the period of cooling its heels in the anterooms of capital, but we can still use a man such as I have described. There's a place for you with us if you want it."

"When do I go to work?" demanded the former lieutenant rising from his seat, and Snowdon countered:

"When will you be ready to begin?"

"When we dock at 'Frisco," came the immediate response, "provided I be allowed time for an affair of my own, two months from now. A certain private in my old company will be discharged from the service then. I fancy he'll land there, and I want to be waiting for him when he steps ash.o.r.e."

"A reprisal?" inquired Snowdon in a disappointed tone, but the other shook his head.

"He is the one man through whom there's a chance of clearing my name,"

Spurrier said slowly. "I hope it won't call for violence."