"No trouble in borrowing three hundred dollars a share, I should say."
"No, it isn't. But--May I ask you a question?"
"Two if you wish," said Jerningham, with one of his likable smiles.
"Why should you need to borrow a trifle, with all the millions in gold you have down-stairs? Or are they only gold bricks you've got in your boxes?"
This was, of course, meant in jest; but Stewardson thought in a flash the trust company did not know for a positive fact that Jerningham's iron-bound and wax-sealed boxes had real gold-dust in them.
"Let me tell you something, Mr. Stewardson," said Jerningham, with that curious earnestness people assume when they discuss matters they do not really understand--"let me tell you this: The time is coming--and coming within a few months!--when good, hard gold is going to command a premium just as it practically did during the Bryan free-silver scare in 1896. I am going to save mine. I want to have it in readiness to take advantage of--"
"But present conditions are utterly different--"
"They are always different--and yet the panics come! You thought that after 1896 there would never again be any need for clearing-house certificates; and yet, in 1907--"
"They were unnecessary--" began Stewardson, hotly.
He had been left out of all conferences among the powers at that trying time, and naturally disapproved their actions.
"But they happened, just the same! I know myself. If I cash in now I'll buy something with the money. I don't want to buy now. No, sir! If I should happen to need a million or two I prefer to borrow it for a few weeks until my next shipment comes in. There will be two millions coming in about the middle of next month. I've sent word to get out as big an output as possible. See? You bet your boots Wall Street is not going to get either my cash or my mines, as they did Colonel Cannon's. You know he was The Mexican copper king' one day and That jackass from Chihuahua' the next! See?"
The vice-president looked at him and said "I see!" in a very flattering tone of voice; but in his inmost mind he was thinking that such a thing was precisely what doubtless would happen to Mr. Alfred Jemingham, late of Nome. It is always the extremely suspicious, too-smart-for-you-by-heck! farmer who buys the biggest gold brick.