Brainard laughed.
“I should say not! There are millions of tons of copper in those hills.”
“Then what was the trouble?”
“It cost too much to mine and smelt it at present prices. After pouring a good bit of money into the thing, I found that out. The sulfur looked promising, and we went in for that; but that, too, came near taking our last dollar before it made good.”
He told the magazine man how he had discovered traces of sulfur in an old crater among the hills, had made tests, and had found that the mineral existed in great quantities and almost pure. But when they went after it, new difficulties were encountered—quicksands. One method after another was tried and found useless, until the experts he had summoned were ready to give up the job. Then, almost in despair, Brainard had experimented with a novel method of extracting the sulfur by pumping steam through one pipe into the earth and taking the solution out by another. It was successful.
“It’s a steady yellow stream out of the bowels of the earth—a stream of gold!”
The young man sighed with envy.
“Better than gold,” Brainard continued. “A thousand per cent better! I wouldn’t dare tell you how much money that yellow stream pours into my pockets every twenty-four hours.”
Farson’s eyes gleamed, and he looked covetously at the bulging pockets of the miner’s loose coat.
“So you made good,” he said; “and of course you came up here to New York, straight off, to spend your money.”