"It's not so much that, although a Chinaman would be better company. Shorty doesn't mind, he's used to it; but I get thinking, and thinking. What does it all amount to—this life?"
"It's jolly good fun while it lasts."
"For you—yes. I used to say the same in my college days, but now— Do you know, Miss Burrows talked with me to-day for the first time. Before that her greetings were like mine to a horse when I stroke its nose. I'm not thirty yet, but from her point of view I don't count."
"I think," said the Blackguard, "that the symptoms demand a pill. How is our tongue?—our pulse? Um!—ah!—we shall get over it. But seriously, why don't you scratch up a fight with somebody—say, with Shorty? That would do you a world of good."
"You're a rare good sort, Blackguard, but you don't seem to understand. This Tough Nut Claim is as good as claims go—nine feet of passable wet ores running a steady average of thirty-five dollars a ton; but until we get shipping facilities it might as well be at the North Pole. There'll be a railroad through the valley in, say, ten years. Suppose we sell out then at fifty thousand—I shall be forty then, and the only reading matter meanwhile is the New York Police Gazette, with a number of the Century perhaps once in six months. It isn't good enough."
"By George, when a prospector gets the blues he's worse than an old soldier. Go on, if it does you good."
"I should have been all right but for Burrows yonder, with plenty of cariboo, not a few grizzlies; and these summits would knock the spots out of the Alpine Club. But the Lunatic, as we call him, has put us all out of date. It's all very well sneering at new ideas, but his methods are further above our heads than American quartz-mining is above the fuddling of the old Spanish colonists. They had ladder shafts, buckets for pumping, an arastra for milling; we have common sense tunnelling, and send sorted ores to the smelter. Burrows sneers at our fissure veins, and quarries the bare country granite. Of course, I knew all along that whole mountain ranges run a dollar and a half to the ton, but I didn't care while milling cost two dollars a ton. This man is a heaven-born genius, who can mine, mill, and render his gold into ingots for only a dollar a ton."
The Blackguard whistled. "If that's true," he said, "the man's got a corner on gold—why, it's awful!"
"Archimedes said that he could capsize the planet if he had leverage. This man has leverage; capitalise his idea, get the place in the Sierras where there are the best conditions of labour, power, freighting, gradients, and a seaport; then turn him loose because he has the philosopher's stone which can transmute whole ranges of mountains into gold."
"He's such a cad, too," said the Blackguard. "But how did you find him out?"