“The next question is, where am I to get the money for the things we need?” Ben remarked. “I could get them on credit, I think, from an old mining friend of my father’s; but I hate to go in debt, especially on an uncertainty. I’ve been thinking about offering him a small percentage in exchange for the materials. Then, it would be his own risk whether he got his money or not.”
“Pshaw! You don’t want to give away any more percentages. A man’s got to go in debt—more or less—in ’most every business. Besides, your money’s right in sight, as it were.”
“No, it isn’t,” Ben stoutly replied. “That’s just the trouble; I think it is, but I don’t know it. What right have I to promise to pay a man out of my thinking?”
“There ain’t any other way. You’ve just got to do it; or borrow the money from some one else, which amounts to the same thing.” He paused for a reply, but as he noticed Ben’s hesitation he hastened to divert him from his weighing of right and wrong. “I recollec’ a chimney on one of Senator Fair’s mills up in Nevada, that yielded a pile of gold and silver when ’twas broke up. Why, they found one solid lump of silver half as big as my fist, in a crack in the masonry. You see, the gold what stays in the furnaces, works right into the mortar and bricks in a dust so fine you can’t see it. That’s why you need a ’rastra. But, sometimes, fine particles of precip’tated silver’ll get blown into a crack, until there’s a big lump formed.”
They peered up the gaping black mouth of the chimney. The furnaces had been roughly torn out and large openings marked where they had joined the chimney.
“Tell you what, Ben,” exclaimed Mundon, “s’pose I skin up and see what I kin see?”
“No, let me go!” the boy eagerly replied.
He was a trifle ashamed of the jealousy he had already begun to feel of this man’s wider experience. If there were lumps of gold and silver glittering in his chimney, he wanted to be the first to see them.
“It’s a dirty job; but I’ve got on old clothes,” he said as he began to climb up the black funnel.