"That's what drives prospectors crazy," he drawled. "Looking for more of the same. You keep that, Doris, if you like it. If I ever get hold of enough of that, I'll call it a mine." He laughed again disarmingly. "You know folks call me Hopeful Bill," he added quaintly.
"You'd be Sure-thing Bill, if you ever found a mine of that." Mr. Rayfield's good eye dwelt hungrily upon the sample. "I suppose you're on the trail of it. You wouldn't be human if you weren't looking for more of the same. Well, I hope you locate it. I do, for a fact. I know I wouldn't rest until I located that."
Bill's laugh betrayed nothing more than amusement, but his eyes forgot to twinkle. They were fixed rather intently on Mr. Rayfield's smooth, smiling face.
"And when you had it located—then what would you do?"
"Do?" Mr. Rayfield looked up, astonished. "What would a man do, with a gold mine like that?" He returned to the spreading of peach preserves carefully between two hot cakes. "Organize a company and avail myself of the most modern methods of mining it. A good, clean corporation, Mr. Dale, is the most efficient, the most satisfactory methods I know of to-day. I certainly would organize at once and start out right to get the gold cheaply as possible and market the product as profitably as possible. There is no other intelligent method, these days."
Mr. Emmett looked up dissentingly. "There you go on your hobby," he remarked. "The country's been done to death with wild-cat organizations that found a showing of mineral and hustled a corporation together. Look at the companies we've been sent to investigate, Walter! I should think that would sicken you of corporations."
"We investigated a lot of crooked corporations, yes." Mr. Rayfield admitted it calmly. "We helped the government send more than one bunch of crooked officers to the penitentiary—where they belong. But crooks always will take advantage of the best machinery invented, John. And those very investigations taught me the details of organizing and operating corporations. They proved to me that a man is a fool to potter along by himself with any mine—I don't care how rich it is! You can't work a mine as you would a farm. Why? Because your potential harvest is all there, in the ground, waiting for you to gather it. A farm yields its wealth season by season—on the installment plan, we'll say. Whereas the mineral in a mine is there; all of it. It was put there long before it was ever discovered. The faster and the cheaper you take it out, the greater your profit. That stands to reason. What man of intelligence would spend ten, twenty years, we'll say, taking out a million dollars, when an efficient corporation will get it for him in less than half that time?"
He held up his cup for more coffee and smiled blandly at Doris, who was listening to him with flattering attention.
"Miss Hunter, you see the point, don't you? I'll venture to say that you'd want your millions dug out by machinery, in the shortest time possible."
Doris laughed and looked again at the gold ore beside her plate.