“There might be. There is always that possibility.... On the other hand, I should advise your friend to go with extreme caution.”
“You’re not—you’re not very stimulating,” she said ruefully.
“I’m just being as honest as I can,” said Clement, with a meaning she could not appreciate, for actually he was. His whole instinct told him to pour the coldest of cold water upon that mining scheme—and yet he couldn’t altogether in fairness do that.
“I believe you are,” she said softly, and with a surprising intuition she added, “I believe you’d be honest even against your own interests.”
In the tiny and quite significant pause that followed that touch of curiously personal intimacy, Clement felt bound to say, “You see, Miss Heloise, mining is a risky venture. You can throw away more money and more easily in mining than you can in anything else—not even excepting theaters and newspapers. There are so many things that make it a gamble. The lode or stope may peter out. There may be immense difficulties in cutting shafts. There may be fatal drawbacks in the matter of transport, of working, of labor, and scores of things.... Mineral finds that look good at the first assay may not pay for their keep when they come to be worked. I know these valleys. We came across some seams that looked good. They looked enormously good to a tenderfoot like myself, for example. But the experts with the party wouldn’t look at them. Nothing in them. Not worth the blasting.... Your friend certainly should be advised to move with the greatest care in this matter.”
The girl was silent for a while.
“It hurts so to shatter people’s dreams,” she said in a low voice. And then she said on a lighter note, “But I remember—you talked of difficulties that turned on transport; most of the difficulties do, don’t they?”
“Yes; it’s lack of transport facilities that kills most mining ventures.”
“Well,” cried the girl, with glee, “that’s a difficulty that doesn’t hold good here.... The railway runs within a very short distance of the claims. Doesn’t that make it sound more hopeful?”
Clement said decisively, “It makes it sound hopeless.”