Smaltz was a liar, as he said, but Bruce knew that he had told the truth regarding Banule's work. He confirmed the suspicions and fears that had been in Bruce's mind for months. Therefore, when he said quietly to Banule--"You'd better go up the hill!" there was that in his voice and eyes which made that person take his departure with only a little less celerity than Smaltz had taken his.
It remained for Bruce to gather up Banule's scattered tools, drain the pumps, and nail the pump-house door. When he closed the head gate and turned the water back into Big Squaw Creek, removed the belting from the pulleys in the power-house and shut the place up tight, he felt that it was much like making arrangements for his own funeral.
At last everything was done and Porcupine Jim, who had stayed on a day or so to help, was waiting for Bruce to finish his letter to Helen Dunbar so he could take it up the hill. Jim sat by the kitchen stove whistling dismally through his teeth while Bruce groped for words in which to break the news of his complete failure.
If only he could truthfully hold out some hope! But there was not the slightest that he could see. Harrah was out of it. The stockholders had lost both confidence and interest in him and his proposition and would sell out, as they had notified him they would do if the season's work was a failure--and consider themselves lucky to have the chance. It was a foregone conclusion that Sprudell would shortly own the controlling stock.
There was nothing for it but the blunt truth so Bruce wrote: Sprudell boasted that he would down me and he has. Villainy, incompetency and carelessness have been too strong a combination for my inexperience to beat.
I've failed. I'm broke. I've spent $40,000 and have nothing to show for it but a burned-out plant of an obsolete type.
You can't imagine how it hurts to write these words. The disappointment and humiliation of it passes belief. No one who has not been through an experience like it could ever, even faintly, understand.
I grow hot and cold with shame when I look back now and see my mistakes. They are so plain that it makes me feel a fool--an ignorant, conceited, inexperienced fool. I've learned many lessons, but at what a price!
You'll see from the enclosed paper what I was up against. But it does not excuse me, not in the least. Thinking myself just, I was merely weak. A confiding confidence in one's fellowman is very beautiful in theory but there's nothing makes him more ridiculous when it's taken advantage of. When I recall the suspicious happenings that should have warned me from Jenning's incompetency to Smaltz's villainy I have no words in which to express my mortification. The stockholders cannot condemn me more severely for my failure than I condemn myself.