Still she had hopes. If he plunged into business associations with
Jimmie Brooks and Paul Lorimer and others of that group, there was no
telling what might happen. His interests might become permanently
identified with Granville. She loved her big, wide-shouldered man,
anyway. So she continued to playfully rumple his hair and kept her
thoughts to herself.
Bill informed her from time to time as to the progress of his venture.
Brooks and Lorimer put him in touch with two others who were ready to
chance money on the strength of Bill's statements. The company was
duly incorporated, with an authorized capital of one hundred thousand
dollars, five thousand dollars' worth of stock being taken out by each
on a cash basis--the remaining seventy-five thousand lying in the
company treasury, to be held or sold for development purposes as the
five saw fit when work began to show what the claims were capable of
producing.
Whitey Lewis set out. Bill stuck a map on their living-room wall and
pointed off each day's journey with a pin. Hazel sometimes studied the
map, and pitied them. So many miles daily in a dreary waste of snow;
nights when the frost thrust its keen-pointed lances into their tired
bodies; food cooked with numbed fingers; the dismal howling of wolves;
white frost and clinging icicles upon their beards as they trudged
across trackless areas; and over all that awesome hush which she had
learned to dread--breathless, brooding silence.
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