 | Tales of the jazz age |  |
IV
This is a story of the Washington family as Percy
sketched it for John during breakfast.
The father of the present Mr. Washington had been
a Virginian, a direct descendant of George Washington,
and Lord Baltimore. At the close of the Civil War he
was a twenty-five-year-old Colonel with a played-out
plantation and about a thousand dollars in gold.
Fitz-Norman Culpepper Washington, for that was the
young Colonel's name, decided to present the Virginia
estate to his younger brother and go West. He selected
two dozen of the most faithful blacks, who, of course,
worshipped him, and bought twenty-five tickets to the
West, where he intended to take out land in their names
and start a sheep and cattle ranch.
When he had been in Montana for less than a month
and things were going very poorly indeed, he stumbled
on his great discovery. He had lost his way when riding
in the hills, and after a day without food he began to
grow hungry. As he was without his rifle, he was forced
to pursue a squirrel, and in the course of the pursuit he
noticed that it was carrying something shiny in its
mouth. Just before it vanished into its hole—for Providence
did not intend that this squirrel should alleviate
his hunger—it dropped its burden. Sitting down to
consider the situation Fitz-Norman's eye was caught
had completely lost his appetite and gained one hundred
thousand dollars. The squirrel, which had refused
with annoying persistence to become food, had
made him a present of a large and perfect diamond.
Late that night he found his way to camp and twelve
hours later all the males among his darkies were back
by the squirrel hole digging furiously at the side of the
mountain. He told them he had discovered a rhinestone
mine, and, as only one or two of them had ever
seen even a small diamond before, they believed him,
without question. When the magnitude of his discovery
became apparent to him, he found himself in a quandary.
The mountain was a diamond—it was literally nothing
else but solid diamond. He filled four saddle bags full
of glittering samples and started on horseback for St.
Paul. There he managed to dispose of half a dozen
small stones—when he tried a larger one a storekeeper
fainted and Fitz-Norman was arrested as a public disturber.
He escaped from jail and caught the train for
New York, where he sold a few medium-sized diamonds
and received in exchange about two hundred thousand
dollars in gold. But he did not dare to produce any
exceptional gems—in fact, he left New York just in
time. Tremendous excitement had been created in
jewelry circles, not so much by the size of his diamonds
as by their appearance in the city from mysterious
sources. Wild rumors became current that a diamond
mine had been discovered in the Catskills, on the Jersey
coast, on Long Island, beneath Washington Square.
Excursion trains, packed with men carrying picks and
shovels, began to leave New York hourly, bound for
various neighboring El Dorados. But by that time
young Fitz-Norman was on his way back to Montana.
By the end of a fortnight he had estimated that the
quantity to all the rest of the diamonds known to exist
in the world. There was no valuing it by any regular
computation, however, for it was one solid diamond—
and if it were offered for sale not only would the bottom
fall out of the market, but also, if the value should vary
with its size in the usual arithmetical progression, there
would not be enough gold in the world to buy a tenth
part of it. And what could any one do with a diamond
that size?
It was an amazing predicament. He was, in one
sense, the richest man that ever lived—and yet was he
worth anything at all? If his secret should transpire
there was no telling to what measures the Government
might resort in order to prevent a panic, in gold as well
as in jewels. They might take over the claim immediately
and institute a monopoly.
There was no alternative—he must market his mountain
in secret. He sent South for his younger brother
and put him in charge of his colored following—darkies
who had never realized that slavery was abolished. To
make sure of this, he read them a proclamation that he
had composed, which announced that General Forrest
had reorganized the shattered Southern armies and defeated
the North in one pitched battle. The negroes
believed him implicitly. They passed a vote declaring
it a good thing and held revival services immediately.
Fitz-Norman himself set out for foreign parts with
one hundred thousand dollars and two trunks filled with
rough diamonds of all sizes. He sailed for Russia in a
Chinese junk and six months after his departure from
Montana he was in St. Petersburg. He took obscure
lodgings and called immediately upon the court jeweller,
announcing that he had a diamond for the Czar. He
remained in St. Petersburg for two weeks, in constant
and afraid to visit his trunks more than three or
four times during the whole fortnight.
On his promise to return in a year with larger and finer
stones, he was allowed to leave for India. Before he
left, however, the Court Treasurers had deposited to
his credit, in American banks, the sum of fifteen million
dollars—under four different aliases.
He returned to America in 1868, having been gone a
little over two years. He had visited the capitals of
twenty-two countries and talked with five emperors,
eleven kings, three princes, a shah, a khan, and a sultan.
At that time Fitz-Norman estimated his own
wealth at one billion dollars. One fact worked consistently
against the disclosure of his secret. No one of
his larger diamonds remained in the public eye for a
week before being invested with a history of enough
fatalities, amours, revolutions, and wars to have occupied
it from the days of the first Babylonian Empire.
From 1870 until his death in 1900, the history of Fitz-Norman
Washington was a long epic in gold. There
were side issues, of course—he evaded the surveys, he
married a Virginia lady, by whom he had a single son,
and he was compelled, due to a series of unfortunate
complications, to murder his brother, whose unfortunate
habit of drinking himself into an indiscreet stupor had
several times endangered their safety. But very few
other murders stained these happy years of progress
and expansion.
Just before he died he changed his policy, and with all
but a few million dollars of his outside wealth bought
up rare minerals in bulk, which he deposited in the safety
vaults of banks all over the world, marked as bric-à-brac.
His son, Braddock Tarleton Washington, followed this
policy on an even more tensive scale. The minerals
—so that the equivalent of a billion dollars in gold could
be placed in a receptacle no bigger than a cigar box.
When Fitz-Norman had been dead three years his
son, Braddock, decided that the business had gone far
enough. The amount of wealth that he and his father
had taken out of the mountain was beyond all exact
computation. He kept a note-book in cipher in which
he set down the approximate quantity of radium in
each of the thousand banks he patronized, and recorded
the alias under which it was held. Then he did a very
simple thing—he sealed up the mine.
He sealed up the mine. What had been taken out of
it would support all the Washingtons yet to be born in
unparalleled luxury for generations. His one care must
be the protection of his secret, lest in the possible panic
attendant on its discovery he should be reduced with
all the property-holders in the world to utter poverty.
This was the family among whom John T. Unger was
staying. This was the story he heard in his silver-walled
living-room the morning after his arrival.
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