BY WILLIAM DRYSDALE.
"I'm going to have a shy at that gold when we get up to Potosi, Jack. I tell you forty thousand dollars in gold is worth looking for these days."
Ned Peterson leaned back in one of the great rocking-chairs on the upper gallery of the Hôtel de France, in Port of Spain, on the island of Trinidad, and puffed his cigar as complacently as though the gold were already in his trunk. He was fresh out of the School of Mines of Columbia College, and so felt at liberty to lay down the law to his fourteen-year-old brother Jack. They were both on their way into the heart of Venezuela, to the gold-mines of Naparima, of which their father was superintendent and part owner.
"Oh, that's just one of your romantic notions," Jack replied, standing by his brother and looking through the jalousie-blinds at the coolies squatting in the park across the street. "You want a chance to write to your chums in New York that you're searching for lost gold in the bottom of the Orinoco River. It sounds well, but it won't amount to anything."
"You don't know what you're talking about," the young man retorted, with great dignity. "We know the gold is there, and it will be an easy matter to find out just about where the canoe was when it capsized and dumped it into the river. Of course there has been a great deal of searching for it, but never under as favorable circumstances as we shall find. Last November, when the gold was lost, the water in the Orinoco was sixty feet higher than it is now. At this time of year, midwinter, it is so low that the steamers cannot go further up the river than the City of Bolivar. At Potosi the water is not more than three or four feet deep just now, and by sounding in the mud we will have an excellent chance of finding the box. Anyhow, it's worth trying for. Forty-one thousand three hundred and forty dollars is the exact value of it."
"You have it down fine!" Jack laughed. "Couldn't you take off a dollar or two?"
"Not a cent," Ned answered. "They send the gold down from the mines in bars, two bars in a box, and each bar weighing exactly 1000 ounces. I suppose you know that gold is worth $20.67 an ounce, always and in all countries. That price never varies. So it is easy to calculate the value of the two bars. It was a great setback to father's management, the loss of those two bars right at the beginning."
"I've heard an awful lot about those two bars of gold," Jack said, "but I never quite understood the thing. How did they come to be lost?"
Ned was quite willing to show his superior knowledge by telling the story of the lost gold. "You see, father took charge of the mines at a very bad time," he began. "It had been a gilt-edged investment for a long time, and the two-hundred-dollar shares paid ten dollars a month in dividends. But the veins of ore contracted, and dividends went down to a dollar a month, and as father stepped in just at that time he got all the blame for the reduction. Then came the loss of the two bars, and that made matters worse.
"The mines, you know," he continued, "are on the Urubu River, a branch of the Orinoco, forty miles above Potosi. Potosi is a little native settlement at the junction of the two rivers, a hundred miles above Bolivar, and Bolivar, as you know, is two hundred and fifty miles up the Orinoco from here. They run the gold into bars at the mines, pack it two bars in a box, and send the box in a big canoe down to Potosi, with a guard of three or four armed men. From Potosi it goes in the steamer to Bolivar, and from Bolivar it is carried, along with other things, by great teams of forty and sixty bullocks over the mountains to Caracas, the capital, where it is coined in the mint.