They had already indicated
their bent by voting an annual stipend of ten thousand and six thousand
dollars to Lorimer and Brooks as president and secretary respectively.
Me, they proposed to quiet with a manager's wage of a mere five
thousand a year--after I got on the ground and began to get my back up.
Free Gold would have been a splendid Stock Exchange possibility. They
had it all doped out how they could make sundry clean-ups irrespective
of the mine's actual product. That was the first thing that made me
dubious. They were stock-market gamblers, manipulators pure and
simple. But I might have let it go at that, seeing it was their game
and not one that I or anybody I cared about would get fleeced at. I
didn't approve of it, you understand. It was their game.
But they capped the climax with what I must cold-bloodedly characterize
as the baldest attempt at a dirty fraud I ever encountered. And they
had the gall to try and make me a party to it. To make this clear you
must understand that I, on behalf of the company and acting as the
company's agent, grubstaked Whitey Lewis and four others to go in and
stake those claims. I was empowered to arrange with these five men
that if the claims made a decent showing each should receive five
thousand dollars in stock for assigning their claims to the company,
and should have employment at top wages while the claims were operated.
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