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The five thousand dollars appear to have been employed in digging or building a sluice through which a constant current of currency flows from the city to Rottenbottom and Millefleur. The merchant has gone into bank, and the tide flows on. At last the planter writes: "The most magnificent crop ever raised on Red River, just waiting for the necessary hands to gather it in!"
He chooses his own time, and at an early day walks into the business-house of Negocier & Duthem. They are pleased to see the colonel in the way of business, as they have been in society, and the pleasure is mutual. As he expounds his plans they are more and more convinced that he is a plumy bird of much waste feather. He has taken Rottenbottom and Millefleur, and is going pretty well into cotton.
The Southerner invests his in diamonds because he likes show, and diamonds have a pretty steady market value. There is method, too, in the colonel's associations, and all his acquaintance is gilt-edged and bankable. His business is now done, and he does not tarry, but wings his way to Millefleur and Rottenbottom, where he moults all his fine feathers.
The Millefleur and Rottenbottom plantations are famous, and a hand well over the crops raised under such shrewd, experienced management as that of Colonel Beverage is a stroke of policy. Therefore, as the bankers and jewelers have been polite, so now the cotton-merchants are civil; but the colonel is shy an old bird and a game bird. Shy, but not suspicious.
It is his nature to be sanguine, and to hope loudly, vaingloriously; and he writes it honestly enough to his merchant and draws. The labor gets worse and worse. In the indolent summer days the negro, careless, thriftless, ignorant, works only at intervals. Perhaps the June rise catches him, and there is a heavy expense in ditching and damming to save the Rottenbottom crop.
It may even have slipped into the personals of the Pic and Times that Colonel Beverage has taken Millefleur and Rottenbottom plantations on Red River, and is going extensively into the cultivation of the staple. The colonel is modest over this: "not extensively, no, but to the extent of his limited means." In the mean while he looks out for some sound, well-recommended cotton-house.
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