T. Victor Sprudell's dinner guests were soon to arrive, and Mr. Sprudell's pearl gray spats were twinkling up and down the corridor of Bartlesville's best hotel, and back and forth between the private dining-room and the Room of Mystery adjoining, where mechanics of various kinds had been busy under his direction, for some days.
But now, so far as he could see, everything was in perfect working order and he had only to sit back and enjoy his triumph and receive congratulations; for once more Mr. Sprudell had demonstrated his versatile genius!
The invited guests came, all of them--a few because they wanted to, and the rest because they were afraid to stay away. Old Man "Gid" Rathburn, who cherished for Sprudell the same warm feeling of regard that he had for a rattlesnake, occupied the seat of honor, while John Z. Willetts, a local financier, whose closet contained a skeleton that Sprudell by industrious sleuthing had managed to unearth, was placed at his host's left to enjoy himself as best he could. Adolph Gotts, who had the contract for the city paving and hoped to renew it, was present for the sole purpose, as he stated privately, of keeping the human catamount off his back. Others in the merry party were Abram Cone and Y. Fred Smart.
The dinner was the most elaborate the chef had been able to devise, the domestic champagne was as free as the air, and Mr. Sprudell, stimulated by the presence of the moneyed men of Bartlesville and his private knowledge of the importance of the occasion, was keyed up to his best. Genial, beaming, he quoted freely from his French and Latin phrase-book and at every turn of the conversation was ready with appropriate verse--his own, mostly.
This was Mr. Sprudell's only essay at promoting, but he knew how it was done. A good dinner, wine, cigars; and he had gone the ingenious guild of money-raisers one better by an actual, uncontrovertible demonstration of the safety and value of his scheme.
His personal friends already had an outline of the proposition, with the promise that they should hear more, and now, after a dash through "Spurr's Geology Applied to Mining," he was prepared to tell them all that their restricted intelligences could comprehend.
When the right moment arrived, Mr. Sprudell arose impressively. In an attentive silence, he gave an instructive sketch of the history of gold-mining, beginning with the plundering expeditions of Darius and Alexander, touching lightly on the mines of Iberia which the Roman wrestled from the Carthagenians, and not forgetting, of course, the conquest of Mexico and Peru inspired by the desire for gold.