Redwood Empire by Elizabeth Lowell as Ann Maxwell

Author:Elizabeth Lowell as Ann Maxwell [Maxwell, Elizabeth Lowell as Ann]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Historical Romance, Action Adventure Mystery & Detective
ISBN: 9780373288670
Google: xJ_Q6Zi02xQC
Amazon: 0373288670
Barnesnoble: 0373288670
Goodreads: 1430042
Publisher: Harlequin
Published: 1987-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eleven

The Delmonico Hotel became Will Hawthorne's new home. It wasn't the finest hotel in Eureka, but it was more respectable than the crib-houses on First Street. There was a rugged masculinity to the Delmonico that appealed both to Victorian gentlemen and to frontiersmen alike. The Delmonico was also among the more tolerant establishments in Eureka. The dining room and lobby bar were open twenty-four hours a day, and the desk clerk cast a blind eye on the goings and comings of hotel guests—or their companions, for that matter. As a result, the Delmonico vibrated with activity no matter what the time of day or night. It became home to dozens of men like Will who were trying to turn a dollar, or a thousand, in the lumber business.

There were at least a dozen ways to get rich on the redwood coast. Most of the residents of the Delmonico had tried one or more variations on each of a dozen themes. To such men lumbering was an all day, every day, no-limit poker game. All the chips were green, and each one represented a six hundred and forty acre parcel of forestland that had a potential profit of ten thousand dollars an acre.

Some of the Delmonicans were timber cruisers who roamed the unexplored land, locating unclaimed timber stands on behalf of Eastern or European investor syndicates. Other residents were themselves speculators who bought, sold or traded timber claims, often sight unseen, on the basis of hunches or inside information about the continually changing needs of the lumber business. There were already ten mills operating in Eureka with a new mill being proposed each month. Every one of those mills chewed up logs and spat out finished lumber by the millions of board feet.

None of the existing mills was as big as Hale Hawthorne's Tres Santos, but several large Midwestern syndicates had sent agents to the redwoods to explore the prospects of the country. There were rumors of impending investment by a number of Lake State firms that had watched Kroeber's succor with great interest. Each rumor fueled a speculation concerning the future price of logs in a volatile market which in turn directly affected the price of timber claims. As with unregulated claims-and-shares markets that sprang up in every mining city in the West, the purchase, sale and resale of logging claims were based on paper transactions rather than on a tangible exchange of goods. Most of the logging claims had been seen by only a handful of white men and were years away from being cut, but that just made the profits—and losses— in trading timber claims all the more extreme.

So many fortunes were made and lost in the Del-monico bar, with its pastel portraits of Rubenesque nudes, that it became known locally as the Stock Exchange. Action in the Stock Exchange might have been a bit more genteel than that in the Humboldt House, but it was every bit as cutthroat.

Will

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