If Dave had been a believer in fairy tales he might have thought himself the hero of one.  A few days earlier he had come to Malapi on this same train, in a day coach, poorly dressed, with no job and no prospects in life.  He had been poor, discredited, a convict on parole.  Now he wore good clothes, traveled in a Pullman, ate in the diner, was a man of consequence, and, at least on paper, was on the road to wealth.  He would put up at the Albany instead of a cheap rooming-house, and he would meet on legitimate business some of the big financial men of the West.  The thing was hardly thinkable, yet a turn of the wheel of fortune had done it for him in an hour.

The position in which Sanders found himself was possible only because Crawford was himself a financial babe in the woods.  He had borrowed large sums of money often, but always from men who trusted him and held his word as better security than collateral.  The cattleman was of the outdoors type to whom the letter of the law means little.  A debt was a debt, and a piece of paper with his name on it did not make payment any more obligatory.  If he had known more about capital and its methods of finding an outlet, he would never have sent so unsophisticated a man as Dave Sanders on such a mission.

For Dave, too, was a child in the business world.  He knew nothing of the inside deals by which industrial enterprises are underwritten and corporations managed.  It was, he supposed, sufficient for his purpose that the company for which he wanted backing was sure to pay large dividends when properly put on its feet.

But Dave had assets of value even for such a task.  He had a single-track mind.  He was determined even to obstinacy.  He thought straight, and so directly that he could walk through subtleties without knowing they existed.

When he reached Denver he discovered that Crawford had followed the Governor to the western part of the State, where that official had gone to open a sectional fair.  Sanders had no credentials except a letter of introduction to the manager of the stockyards.

“What can I do for you?” asked that gentleman.  He was quite willing to exert himself moderately as a favor to Emerson Crawford, vice-president of the American Live Stock Association.

“I want to meet Horace Graham.”

“I can give you a note of introduction to him.  You’ll probably have to get an appointment with him through his secretary.  He’s a tremendously busy man.”

Dave’s talk with the great man’s secretary over the telephone was not satisfactory.  Mr. Graham, he learned, had every moment full for the next two days, after which he would leave for a business trip to the East.

There were other wealthy men in Denver who might be induced to finance the Jackpot, but Dave intended to see Graham first.  The big railroad builder was a fighter.  He was hammering through, in spite of heavy opposition from trans-continental lines, a short cut across the Rocky Mountains from Denver.  He was a pioneer, one who would take a chance on a good thing in the plunging, Western way.  In his rugged, clean-cut character was much that appealed to the managers of the Jackpot.