"Before he could realize what was happening, the other miners crowded round, and pegged out claims to the very borders of his tent. All he got out of it was the small bit of ground on which his tent stood. The pocket only yielded a hundred dollars' worth of gold, his neighbors to right and left, got more than ten times that amount in the first three days.
"I could go on for hours, Jim, telling you about the Australian gold-fields, but I've said enough to show you that I meant what I said when I suggested that it was a pity that you hadn't found gold. The mining of every other metal needs a lot of capital to begin with—as gold does, when you begin to work a reef—but, in nearly every gold deposit, there are placers or pockets where a man can clean up quickly."
Jim's face was glowing with a lively interest. His excitement had grown as the mine-owner proceeded.
"And these here nuggets," he queried, "what makes 'em? Where do they come from? We don't find anything like that over here!"
"No," agreed Owens, "you don't. Chunks like 'The Welcome Stranger' which sold for $48,000 and which was found right in the road, the wheel of a passing wagon having cut through the soft earth and exposed it, are peculiar to Australia. Even South Africa, which is the largest gold-producing country in the world, hasn't any nuggets like that.
"As for where nuggets come from, Jim, that's a bit of a puzzle. Some say they grew in the earth, water heavily laden with gold, depositing more and more of the metal in the one place; other scientists claim that the nuggets were made in the days when the earth was all fire, and that the nuggets have been there ever since. Neither theory answers all the facts. It's truer to say that we don't know, yet, how nuggets came to be, nor why Australia has most of them.
"Some day, Jim, if you're interested, I'll try to explain to you the geology of gold. It's pretty complicated. I did a lot of study on it, when I was a young chap. Somehow, I seemed to be one of the men who didn't have any luck at the diggings. So I took to assay work (ore-testing), out there in Australia, and made more with my little assay outfit than most of the miners did with their claims."
Jim propped himself up on one elbow and stared fixedly at the mine-owner.
"You know how to make an assay, yourself?"
"Roughly, yes. Of course, only for field work, you understand. I don't pretend to be a mineralogical chemist."