Hard Money Read Online Free Page A

don’t understand. When we’re married, Hugh, Dad is going to rent five city blocks of San Francisco for the wedding party. He’ll float a boat in champagne. He’ll hire a private car to take us East. In London, Paris, Rome, Vienna, he’ll rent whole floors of hotels.” She looked up at Hugh with quiet appeal in her eyes. “Can’t you see, Hugh? That’s the way he wants to do it. He’s contemptuous of money. That’s his way of showing his contempt.”
    â€œAnd you?” Hugh said quietly. “Do you like the idea?”
    Sharon smiled impudently. “I do. I think it would be fun. I think it would be fun because he’d think so.”
    â€œBut it won’t be his wedding trip!” Hugh said with quiet vehemence.
    â€œYou’re wrong there, Hugh,” Sharon said quietly. “It will be. It will be the last thing he’ll ever force on us. I—I think I ought to allow him that. And he can’t afford it now with his money tied up in this fight. Isn’t it all very simple?”
    Hugh shook his head in puzzlement and lighted his cigar. He looked at his watch, signaled to the waiter and said to Sharon, “I’ll have to go, darling.”
    â€œBut it’s only three.”
    Hugh stubbornly stuck to his point, saying he was required at the mine, and saw Sharon to the foot of the lobby stairs, where he took leave of her. Climbing the stairs, Sharon wondered what she could do until dinner time. In the afternoon she usually rode with her father, whose restlessness took him over the entire camp. She was suddenly lonesome without him and just as suddenly reproved herself for it.
    In the sitting room she found a man dressed in a dark blue uniform of livery, and she recognized him.
    â€œHello, Ben.”
    â€œNote for you from Miz Comber, Miss Bonal,” Ben said, trying to hide the indelicate wad of tobacco in his cheek.
    Sharon took the note. It was from Maizie Comber and asked if Sharon could return with the messenger.
    Sharon got a light wrap, too much against the heat of the desert afternoon, and went down into the lobby, preceded by Ben. At the hitch rack a black red-wheeled top buggy hitched to a beautiful team of bays was waiting, and Sharon climbed in. Ben swung the buggy around into the stream of traffic, and they made their slow way north heading out of town.
    Immediately the heat of the desert sun drove through the buggy top and was all around her. She lay back in the cushions, lips parted a little for air, and watched this colorful parade. It was at times like this that she could not understand this boom camp of Tronah, nor her place here. Abruptly to the west, the gaunt and savage Pintwaters tilted to serrated peaks, their burned and scarified slopes like some gigantic sneer of nature. There was color here, but dark and ominous color of tawny cinder and without a sight of the blessed green of foliage. The high mines up near the peaks she recognized by the jutting shelf of dump heaps, but they were almost invisible unless an observer knew their locations. Here, then, was this strange camp of Tronah, a town sprung up on the very desert at the base of a desert mountain range. Water was piped thirty miles from the blue sierras to the west. Every stick of lumber, every bit of firewood, every bite of food—everything that went to make up life—had to be freighted in here. It was not entirely real, Sharon thought sometimes, as she considered it. To the east there was a vast expanse of rock and sand reaching halfway across the state. Only rare water-holes made it passable at all. To the south and the north it was the same, endless desert, different only in the gauntness of its rock and sand. Overhead all day long, the sky was barren of clouds and the sun poured its thirsty heat down on everything alike, searing it, draining it of life until it was another part of this dead wasteland.
    Later, when they mounted one of the many