Shares, stocks, operations, schemes, all the wild devices of hazard,
fill up his days with exciting successes and damning failures.
His name, prestige, and credit, carry him to the front. As in
the early days, his cool brain and nerve mark him as a desperate
gamester. But his stakes are now gigantic.
Secure in his mansion house, with private wires in his study,
he operates through many brokers and agents. His interrupted law
business is transferred to less prominent Southern advocates.
Philip Hardin's fine hand is everywhere. Reliable dependants,
old prospecting friends and clients, keep him informed by private
cipher of every changing turn of the brilliant Virginia City
kaleidoscope.
Hardin gambles for pleasure, for vanity, and for excitement. Led
on by his desire to stand out from the mass of men, he throws his
fortune, mixed with the funds of Lagunitas, into the maelstrom of
California Street. Success and defeat alternate.
It is a transition time. While war rages in the East, the California
merchant kings are doubling fortunes in the cowardly money piracy
known as California's secession. The "specific contract act" is
the real repudiation of the government's lawful money. This stab in
the back is given to the struggling Union by the well-fed freedom
shriekers of the Union League.
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