“The Diamond as Big as the Ritz”

Summary:

John T. Unger is a sixteen year old from a wealthy family in Hades, Mississippi on his way to San Midas High School in Boston, the school's most exclusive and expensive in the world. He rubs shoulders with the rich and meets another student named Percy Washington. John Percy invited to spend the summer with his family in the West, and John, who loves to be with the super-rich, agrees.

In the West wide train, Percy reveals that his father is the richest man in the world. He has a diamond the size of the Ritz-Carlton hotel. John soon discovers that Percy is telling the truth. Percy's father, T. Braddock Washington, has built a huge castle on a mountain that is literally a solid diamond, flawless. The diamond is set in five square miles in the woods of Montana - the only part of the country that has never been surveyed. The United States does not know that these five square miles there at all, and Fernandez's plan to maintain that way.

As a guest on the enormous estate, John soon learns the history of the Washington family. Braddock father, Colonel Fitz-Norman Culpepper Washington, the mountain of diamonds discovered shortly after the Civil War was over. He realized that he was in a kind of brine: to possess the diamond, he was the richest man in the world.

But if anyone ever discovered the diamond would lose its value as diamonds would no longer be a rare jewel. (The diamond is so large that in essence would flood the market.) So we decided to hide its existence, at all costs. Conducted slaves from his home in Virginia after convincing them that the South had won the Civil War and slavery was still legal.

Braddock inherited the diamond ...