"He jest wanted to come along an' skim off the cream o' some new find, clean up enough dust to keep him goin' for a while, an' then pick up his stakes an' git! It wasn't jest the money Father was after. He liked huntin' after gold, jest for the sake o' huntin'. I've seen him quit a claim that was makin' a fair profit an' start off prospectin', for the sake o' the change. The wilder the spot, the more chance there was o' findin' gold, he used to say; the fewer the folks, the bigger the clean-up. Looked like he was right, too, placer fields peter out mighty fast when a gang gets there."
"They are bound to," Owens agreed.
"But why? There ain't no rule about gold. One placer'll give up millions in dust, an' another ain't worth pannin'."
"There's no rule that will tell you where to find placer gold," the mine-owner corrected, "but don't run away with the idea that gold deposits are all freaks. As a matter of fact, there is a regular science to help a good prospector in hunting for reef or quartz gold. Whether he will find it in sufficient quantity to make the deposit worth working is quite another matter.
"You mustn't think, Jim, that gold happens to be in one place and happens not to be in another as a result of mere chance. There's no chance in Nature. We think there is, sometimes, merely because the factors are so terribly complicated that we can't follow them all.
"What makes the finding of gold seem so much a matter of luck is not because we don't know how the gold came to be where it is, but because we can't know the whole history of the Earth before Man came, and we can't read everything from the rocks which crop out on the surface. But we have some clues, and if you studied out the big money-making gold-mines of to-day, you would find that chance has played but a small part in their discovery and no part at all in their working.
"A lucky prospector may have been the first to find signs of gold in the region, but most likely, he got but little out of it. It was the scientific search which followed that revealed the location of the great rock deposits below in which the gold was thinly scattered, and it was highly specialized mining engineering which made them possible to work. There are mines where ores containing only two dollars' worth of gold (48 grains, a tenth of an ounce) to the ton are successfully handled, and the greater part of the big gold-mines run along quite comfortably on five dollars' worth."
"You mean on a quarter of an ounce o' gold to the ton!" exclaimed Jim, amazed. "I've often got ten times that much in one pan!"
"Exactly. Yet you're not a millionaire, are you? Most gold-mines run on a narrow margin of profit, a dollar or two to the ton of ore crushed. So, you see, the works must be on a huge scale in order to return a dividend on the investment. What's more, you can't afford to establish a big plant unless there's an enormous amount of ore available.
"It's an old rule of wise investors not to put money into a mine that looks too rich. Why?