Hornswogglers, Fourflushers & Snake-Oil Salesmen (7 page)

“They real?” said Slack, still not closing his mouth or taking his eyes from the wide-open buckskin bag that offered so much promise. “I thought you said you had just had about enough with digging in the dirt. That you was done with mining, prospecting, that sort of thing.”

Arnold nodded, still smiling as his fingers swirled around in the puddle of jewels in the open bag. “We're going to let these fine stones do all the digging for us.”

“Whatever you do, Mr. Ralston,” Philip Arnold said while looking around him, even though other than his partner, cousin John Slack, no one else was in sight. He leaned in closer. “Tell no one what we're about to reveal. We're swearing you to secrecy now.”

Mere minutes before these two men had dropped in on William Ralston, a man who'd struck it big from earnings on the Comstock and had subsequently established a bank in San Francisco, the Bank of California, and was noted, among other accomplishments, as “the man who built San Francisco.” (This, of course, is hyperbole, but Ralston did spend much effort in risking all to make his own personal fortunes—and if those efforts helped promote his favorite city, so much the better.)

Ralston knitted his brows. “Yes, yes, of course. You have my word. Now what is it you want?” The banker looked at them appraisingly and did not particularly like what he saw. In fact, he would have cause to regret that he had ever opened the door. It was after all, night, well past the time when he wished to be home. But he knew work's demands did not heed clocks. And now here were two haggard men, looking as if they had just been blown across a raw, parched landscape by fierce, unforgiving winds.

Arnold reached into his ratty wool overcoat, startling Ralston monetarily, until the man pulled out a small bulging bit of cloth, a sack perhaps, the sort of rough-cloth sack that might contain . . . anything. Gold? Had the men struck something and now needed his professional expertise? Ralston's eyes took on a sheen.

Philip Arnold carefully uncinched the top of the bulging sack, reached in, and said, “Now, what I'm about to tell you can't be told to another living soul, mind you.”

“Fine, but what's this all about?” He leaned over the desk, eyeing the sack.

Arnold and then Slack both yawned. “Pardon,” said the first. “We've been dogging it hard for hours.” He leaned over toward Ralston. “And when you see what we got, you'll know why.”

Before Ralston could reply, Arnold, with Slack close by his elbow, unfurled the wide mouth of the crude sack, then spilled the contents onto the desktop's leather blotter.

What Ralston saw pulled his breath in a barely audible gasp, from deep in his throat. There before him was a fortune in uncut diamonds, large ones, small ones, all of them glinting in the yellow lamplight.

He tried to speak, found his throat dry, swallowed, and tried again. “What is it you men would like from me?” What he really wanted to know was if they might tell him where they found them. Diamonds? In North America? Too good to be true, but yet here they were, proof beyond proof.

“We're looking for help, Mr. Ralston. And that's the truth of it. We need sleep, we need rest. And we can't get that so long as we're lugging this around with us.”

“I see.”

Slack nodded, picked up where his partner left off. “Yes, so we wonder if you have a safe you could lock these up in for the night?”

Ralston found himself nodding. “Dogging it for hours, what did you mean by that?” He felt sure now that these men might well be thieves. Should he call the authorities? And yet . . . what if they were not? What if they really had found . . . a diamond field?

Arnold's head snapped back as if Ralston had slapped him. “Why, I should think that would be obvious.” He leaned forward again, his voice lowered though there was no need, as they were the only three in the room. “With a cargo such as this, we could likely be killed for it at any time. If only the scoundrels out there knew.”

Ralston nodded promptly, then peppered them with questions, carefully presented, but questions nonetheless. But they were apparently so dog-tired that they could only yawn, shrug, and then say finally that their diamond field, known only to them, was off somewhere, maybe in Arizona. Beyond that they revealed little more.

“We'll call again soon, but we figured that you being a banker, reputable and all, would be our best bet to keep all this safe. We'll take a receipt for the lot, then come back when we're more alert. We got to get some rest.”

Ralston was about to speak again when Arnold weakly held up a hand. “Whatever you do, though, we ask that you keep this secret. Just between us. Don't tell another living soul. You being a banker and all, we expect your word's a bond.”

Ralston stood unblinking a moment, then hastily nodded. He spoke very little as they took their receipt and watched him as he carefully secreted the diamonds into the safe.

Once outside again on the near-empty sidewalk, Slack turned to his partner. “Why did you tell him that?”

“What?” said Arnold, not really paying attention to Slack, and rubbing his thumb across the smooth paper of the receipt in his pocket.

“By telling him to keep it all a secret, you know, that business about not telling another living soul!” Slack raised his hands and let them flop to his sides.

Finally, Arnold looked at him. “You don't see it, do you?” Then he smiled and shook his head slowly. “John, we have been cousins for quite some time now. Is that not correct?”

Slack scrunched his eyes. “Philip, you know the answer to that as well as I do—we've been cousins as long as we've both been alive, for Pete's sake.”

“Yes, yes, but that's not what I'm talking about. Look,” he said, not smiling, and raking his hand through his close-cropped hair. “We're experienced in a number of undertakings, correct?”

“Again, correct.” Slack folded his arms across his chest, not sure where his always inscrutable cousin was headed with this line of thought. “I'd appreciate you getting to the point, Philip.”

“Fine. My point is simply this: If you are half as sick and tired as I am of working hard for little pay, then what better way to spread the word about our recently discovered diamond field than to prevent someone from speaking of it.”

Slack's eyebrows drew even tighter together.

Arnold sighed and walked slowly along the sidewalk. “Look, John. Have you ever kept a secret? I mean a big one, a really big one?”

“Well, sure. I am a proud Kentucky man after all.”

“So am I. But really, when push comes to shove, people are about as liable to keep their mouths shut as an egg-sucking hound is to mind his own business in a hen house.”

“Oh, I get what you're on about. You hope that sooner or later that banker is going to run off at the mouth and tell his friends the very thing we told him not to.”

“Not only am I hoping on it, cousin. I'm counting on it. And much sooner than later.”

“But how can you be so sure of it?”

Arnold put his arm around Slack's shoulder. “He's human, ain't he?” Then he laughed and laughed all the way to the corner. “Come on, I'll buy you a whiskey . . .
partner
.” He winked and their guffaws echoed down the bustling street, mixing with the other noises of San Francisco at night.

All the way north, to their land in what seemed to Slack as the most lost hill country in all of Wyoming, he kept up a string of questions, some of which he asked several times. Along about the third time for most of the questions, Arnold paused and sighed. “John, if you were any dimmer, I'd be worried for my own safety.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“I mean, cousin, that this is how we're going to do it. We've got to spend money to make money.”

“But you were saving for land back home.”

“And I shall buy land—more than we ever imagined buying. But first I need to invest some of that money and make it into more money. It's called an investment.”

“Your wife ain't going to take kindly to this idea.”

Philip Arnold's jaw muscles bunched and he leaned close to his cousin's face. “You damn right she wouldn't. But that's the good thing about it—she will never know. And if she does find out about this scheme of ours, why then I'll know just who told her, won't I?”

“Aw, you don't have to worry about me, Philip.”

“Good,” said Arnold, his smile slowly returning. “Now, let's get these burros loaded up so we can get on out there and plant these seeds!” He patted the side of his coat, up high, where Slack knew one of the sacks of gems had been safely tucked. There were many others.

Arnold had told him it would be just like sowing seeds, and that's exactly what it turned out to be.

The two men reached the site by midday, and set about carefully distributing the gems on the gravelly earth, wedging some in rocky crevices, others they poked into the ground with the end of a stick.

Within a day of being instructed not to blab, Ralston sent a cable to one Asbury Harpending, a banker friend in London. He told his friend that he had good information, the very best, in fact, that somewhere in the vast West of America there was a diamond field. Its worth, he said, was easily $50 million, perhaps far more. And more to the point, Ralston strongly intimated that he was riding point on the deal. And then Ralston had asked if Harpending would be willing to come on over and help manage it.

Oddly enough, the London banker initially refused. He would later have cause to regret not trusting in those initial bankerly instincts. But soon Harpending could not help himself. He was in a state of awe, primarily wondering if his old friend Ralston was losing his marbles, when another cable from Ralston all but begged him to get the lead out. He arrived in San Francisco by ship in May 1872.

Before Harpending arrived, however, Arnold and Slack dropped in again on Ralston, and Ralston pressed them for further information, not willing to accept their toe-dragging this time. He offered financial help in developing their find into a secure and professional setup. Would they be interested in such?