Chapter
11
A MATTER OF MEMORY.FROM LA SALLE STREET to Goliath Idaho, is ordinarily a matter of some two days' travel; but it required the best part of a year for Ogden Secor to perform the journey.
On the train he had become acquainted with an alert and plausible stranger who owned a gold mine in the mountains north of Ketchum. All that was needed for development was a few hundred dollars' worth of machinery and flumes—then it would make its owners fabulously wealthy.
By the time the train reached Shoshone, Ogdon Secor was inoculated with the insidious virus of gold-fever—that mad malady which races white-hot through the veins of its victims, distorting every mental image and precluding the sane functioning of the powers of reason.
In possession of all his faculties at their best, Sec
