the face of the
block, he was at it in an instant, beating off fragments with his
little hammer.

Tomlinson and his boy Fred were logging in the underbrush near by with
a long chain and yoke of oxen, but the geologist was so excited that he
did not see them till the sound of his eager hammer had brought them to
his side. They took him up to the frame house in the clearing, where
the chatelaine was hoeing a potato patch with a man's hat on her head,
and they gave him buttermilk and soda cakes, but his hand shook so that
he could hardly eat them.

The geologist left Cahoga station that night for the City with a
newspaper full of specimens inside his suit-case, and he knew that if
any person or persons would put up money enough to tear that block of
rock away and follow the fissure down, there would be found there
something to astonish humanity, geologists and all.

* * * * *

After that point in the launching of a gold mine the rest is easy.
Generous, warm-hearted men, interested in geology, were soon found.
There was no stint of money. The great rock was torn sideways from its
place, and from beneath it the crumbled, glittering rock-dust that
sparkled in the sun was sent in little boxes to the testing
laboratories of Plutoria University. There the senior professor of
geology had sat up with it far into the night in a darkened laboratory,
with little blue flames playing underneath crucibles, as in a
magician's cavern, and with the door locked. And as each sample that he
tested was set aside and tied in a cardboard box by itself, he labelled
it "aur. p. 75," and the pen shook in his hand as he marked it. For to
professors of geology those symbols mean "this is seventy-five per cent
pure gold." So it was no wonder that the senior professor of geology
working far into the night among the blue flames shook with excitement;
not, of course, for the gold's sake as money (he had no time to think
of that), but because if this thing was true it meant that an
auriferous vein had been found in what was Devonian rock of the
post-tertiary stratification, and if that was so it upset enough
geology to spoil a textbook. It would mean that the professor could
read a paper at the next Pan-Geological Conference that would turn the
whole assembly into a bedlam.

It pleased him, too, to know that the men he was dealing with were
generous. They had asked him to name his own price or the tests that he
made and when he