The Argosy, August 1905 — page 95: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

< » ber of beans in the jar—proyided he had previously purchased one dollar’s worth of goods—received, at a stated time, and after the beans had been counted, the large gold watch that, lay in a velvet case at the feet of the gen- tleman in the pepper-and-salt suit. And here, also, were colored ties, jeweled scarl-pins, glittering studs and buttons, and checked hose. Sowders, leaning for support against a watch-maker’s post, contemplated the glories in the Levi windows for some minutes. His eyes traveled from the pepper-and-salt suit to the bean jar, from the sailor boy to the golden but- tons. They lingered for a time on the velvet ease. And finally they fell to the least of these things—so far as their vogue in Tontic went—a box of shirts whose stiff, white bosoms glittered under the gas- light. Sowders moved forward. In all his life this prospector-tramp, wearily going by trail from camp to camp, delving now here, now there, now winning, now losing, had never owned a white shirt with a stiff, shiny bosom. Until that moment he had never con- sidered white shirts desirable. But with that assay certificate clutched in his left hand, the white shirts opened a new life to him. He saw himself sitting in the rotunda of the Windsor Hotel in Denver, his shirt bosom shining as it rose from a waistcoat of scarlet, at his collar a string-tie of solemn black. The vision was not impossible of real- ization. The assay certificate told him that. Sowders opened the coor and went in. He was not, at this time, entirely articu- late, but young Mr. Abram Levi, the younger member of the firm, had keen understanding. In a trice he surrounded his customer with a mountain of shirts. They over- flowed from Islue boxes, with their tissue paper surroundings. Their bosoms glearned and shone, and it seeméd that their white arms reached up in suppli- cation. Sowders was bewildered. He had wanted one white shirt.- Young Mr. Levi had tempted him with all there were in stock. aaa A SPECULATION IN SHIRTS. igh Sowders wavered. The pity of it, to take one lone shirt from its fellows when all seemed eager to become the property of the discoverer of the Lucky Dollar! The injustice of it, to leave these brother shirts to their eventual fate as part of the apparel on the re- gardless form of a faro dealer or the man in the look-out chair! Sowders made a sudden resolution. “T want ’em all,” said he to young Mr. Levi, ‘* all—each an’ several. You eall a ’spress wagon.” Within ten minutes the store of the Juevi Brothers was destitute of white shirts. And within a half-hour Sowders was sitting on the seat of an express wagon, rolling happily along toward the Lucky Dollar Mine. The driver turned now and then to glance back at the boxes, after which he would crack his whip and whistle. It was odd, but a fare was a fare and a job was a job. And all sorts of people came to Tontic. For two days the world was a mist to Sowders. On the third day he was awakened to a sense of the gauntness of life and of the uncertainties of the future. Luck deserted him and without seem- ing reason. The cup of dreams was snatched from him. There had been a hideous mistake at the assay office. The certificate he held was that of another, the owner of the Only, not the Lucky Dollar. When he had obtained his own ecard it told nothing of stored riches. There was, to be sure, a trace of lead in the samples he had left, but The hollowness of the error caused him to hasten from the assay office be- fore the chemist had concluded his apology for the blunder. No apology could reconcile Sowders to the situa- tion of not being a prospective million- aire, and, more than this, he had squandered in premature celebration the eash stake he had been so long accumu- lating against his Tontie venture. He went back to his fireless, grubless, and necessarily cheerless cabin, piled high with white, stiff-bosomed shirts, and as he contemplated the symbols of his extravagance, as the picture of him- self in the lobby of the Windsor Hotel | _— = | oe oe eee