“The earth may be full of my metal,” returned Dr. Syx, almost fiercely, “but so long as I alone possess the knowledge how to extract it, is it of any more worth than common dirt? But come,” he added, after a pause and softening his manner, “I have other schemes. Will you, as representatives of the leading nations, undertake the introduction of artemisium as a substitute for gold, or will you not?”
“Can we not have time for deliberation?” asked President Boon.
“Yes, one hour. Within that time I shall return to learn your decision,” replied Dr. Syx, rising and preparing to depart. “I leave these things,” pointing to the tray, “in your keeping, and,” significantly, “I trust your decision will be a wise one.”
His curious smile again curved his lips and shot the ends of his mustache upward, and the influence of that smile remained in the room when he had closed the door behind him. The financiers gazed at one another for several minutes in silence, then they turned towards the coruscating metal that filled the tray.
III. THE GRAND TETON MINE
Away on the western border of Wyoming, in the all but inaccessible heart of the Rocky Mountains, three mighty brothers, “The Big Tetons,” look perpendicularly into the blue eye of Jenny’s Lake, lying at the bottom of the profound depression among the mountains called Jackson’s Hole. Bracing against one another for support, these remarkable peaks lift their granite spires from 12,000 to nearly 14,000 feet into the blue dome that arches the crest of the continent. Their sides, and especially those of their chief, the Grand Teton, are streaked with glaciers, which shine like silver trappings when the morning sun comes up above the wilderness of mountains stretching away eastward from the hole.
When the first white men penetrated this wonderful region, and one of them bestowed his wife’s name upon Jenny’s Lake, they were intimidated by the Grand Teton. It made their flesh creep, accustomed though they were to rough scrambling among mountain gorges and on the brows of immense precipices, when they glanced up the face of the peak, where the cliffs fall, one below another, in a series of breathless descents, and imagined themselves clinging for dear life to those skyey battlements.
But when, in 1872, Messrs. Stevenson and Langford finally reached the top of the Grand Teton—the only successful members of a party of nine practised climbers who had started together from the bottom—they found there a little rectangular enclosure, made by piling up rocks, six or seven feet across and three feet in height, bearing evidences of great age, and indicating that the red Indians had, for some unknown purpose, resorted to the summit of this tremendous peak long before the white men invaded their mountains. Yet neither the Indians nor the whites ever really conquered the Teton, for above the highest point that they attained rises a granite buttress, whose smooth vertical sides seemed to them to defy everything but wings.
Winding across the sage-covered floor of Jackson’s Hole runs the Shoshone, or Snake River, which takes its rise from Jackson’s Lake at the northern end of the basin, and then, as if shrinking from the threatening brows of the Tetons, whose fall would block its progress, makes a détour of one hundred miles around the buttressed heights of the range before it finds a clear way across Idaho, and so on to the Columbia River and the Pacific Ocean.
On a July morning, about a month after the visit of Dr. Max Syx to the assembled financiers in New York, a party of twenty horsemen, following a mountain-trail, arrived on the eastern margin of Jackson’s Hole, and pausing upon a commanding eminence, with exclamations of wonder, glanced across the great depression, where lay the shining coils of the Snake River, at the towering forms of the Tetons, whose ice-striped cliffs flashed lightnings in the sunshine. Even the impassive broncos that the party rode lifted their heads inquiringly, and snorted as if in equine astonishment at the magnificent spectacle.