Читать книгу Hard-Pan. A Story of Bonanza Fortunes онлайн

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“Shall I let myself love her? Do I dare?”

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LETITIA’S surprise at the discovery that Colonel Reed had an unknown daughter was an unconscious compliment to the prominence and conspicuousness still enjoyed by that gentleman.

Hundreds of men who had made their fortunes in the great days of the Comstock, and lost them in the depression that followed, had daughters and sons that the friends of their prosperity neither knew nor cared about. The Californian is shy of all sad, unsuccessful things. Failures in the race in which so many won a prize were quickly forgotten, and crept away to hide their chagrin in distant quarters of the city or in the smaller towns. The procession had passed them by, and men who had been underlings when they were kings reigned in their stead. Even their names were no longer heard, and their children grew up separated by the chasm of poverty and obscurity from the children of their old mates.

That Colonel Reed had not been overlooked was partly accidental and partly owing to his inability to realize that such a state of affairs could be anything but a public misfortune. The colonel had the distinction of having collapsed in a most tremendous and complete manner, and he was proud of it. His case was quoted to inquiring tourist and ambitious native as a star example of money-getting and money-losing in the State of California. His passage from affluence to poverty was still a story worth telling and hearing. It was all in the superlative degree, for the colonel had never done anything by halves. His prosperity had been as extravagantly splendid as his adversity was characteristically complete.