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Demarest and asked him to advertise for two good jerkline skinners to be shipped with the first draft of laborers he would get from San Francisco. She had small hopes of obtaining good skinners by this method, but no other course presented itself. Two days before the start for Julia came a wire from the San Francisco office of Demarest, Spruce & Tillou.
"Will you please tell me again what you did a few days back about the camp at Demarest, Spruce & Tillou?" he asked. "Explain it all, please just why you think the tent town will eventually be located in a different place than it is now." "Why, it's simple," she told him. "It's this way: Demarest, Spruce & Tillou have the main contract here a hundred miles, I've heard.
Let your memory go back to your days in the Humboldt mines '62-'63. You will remember, you and Clagett and Oliver and the old blacksmith Tillou lived in a lean-to which was half-way up the gulch, and there were six log cabins in the camp strung pretty well separated up the gulch from its mouth at the desert to where the last claim was, at the divide.
"So, my friend, it follows as the night the day that Demarest, Spruce & Tillou will eventually move in with their heaviest-hitting outfit to run that cut, which certainly will be left on their hands. It follows as the night the day, again, that the leeches who always drift in to get the stiff's pay day away from them will settle near the biggest camp, if there's sufficient water.
They left the delicately scented mountain country in due course and took up the long, weary journey over the desert. When they were near enough to the buttes to make out objects at their feet it became plain to all that the big outfit of Demarest, Spruce & Tillou had arrived and pitched its camp.
Tillou instructed the others in prospecting, and they went to work with pick and shovel then with drill and blasting-powder. The prospect of immediately becoming millionaires vanished. "One week of this satisfied me. I resigned," is Mark Twain's brief comment. The Humboldt reports had been exaggerated. The Clemens-Clagget-Oliver- Tillou millionaire combination soon surrendered its claims.
Clemens and Tillou set out for Carson City with a Prussian named Pfersdorff, who nearly got them drowned and got them completely lost in the snow before they arrived there. Oliver and Clagget remained in Unionville, began law practice, and were elected to office. It is not known what became of the wagon and horses and the two dogs. It was the end of January when our miner returned to Carson.
Now when Demarest, Spruce & Tillou move in there will be little or no freighting for us to any camp but theirs. All goods will be concentrated in their commissary then, and the subs will buy direct from them and do their own hauling to the various camps.
As yet, though, with so few camps established, this could not reasonably be hoped for, and she had made due allowance for such setbacks when deciding upon her freight rate. She had charged Demarest, Spruce & Tillou three cents a pound for the last consignment. The three trucks that they had seen returned. They were of two-ton capacity.
She thought that until new camps settled on the grade camps of bigger contractors who would buy their supplies direct and not depend on Demarest, Spruce & Tillou Mr. Drummond would have many idle days. Then, of course, he might cut to the bone on the freight rate, and Jo feared that, with the trucks eating nothing while they rested, Drummond might be better able to withstand a rate war.
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