ns themselves. There
were five of these mountains which jutted out into the ocean, and they
suggested roughly the five knuckles of a giant hand clenched and lying
flat upon the surface of the water. They extended for seven miles, and
then the caverns in the palisades began again and continued on down the
coast to the great cliffs that guard the harbor of Olancho's capital.

"The waves tunnelled their way easily enough until they ran up against
those five mountains," mused the engineer, "and then they had to fall
back." He walked to the captain's cabin and asked to look at a map of
the coast line. "I believe I won't go to Rio," he said later in the
day; "I think I will drop off here at Valencia."

So he left the tramp steamer at that place and disappeared into the
interior with an ox-cart and a couple of pack-mules, and returned to
write a lengthy letter from the Consul's office to a Mr. Langham in the
United States, knowing he was largely interested in mines and in
mining. "There are five mountains filled with ore," Clay wrote, "which
should be extracted by open-faced workings. I saw great masses of red
hematite lying exposed on the side of the mountain, only waiting a pick
and shovel, and at one place there were five thousand tons in plain
sight. I should call the stuff first-class Bessemer ore, running about
sixty-three per cent metallic iron. The people know it is there, but
have no knowledge of its value, and are too lazy to ever work it
themselves. As to transportation, it would only be necessary to run a
freight railroad twenty miles along the sea-coast to the harbor of
Valencia and dump your ore from your own pier into your own vessels.
It would not, I think, be possible to ship direct from the mines
themselves, even though, as I say, the ore runs right down into the
water, because there is no place at which it would be safe for a large
vessel to touch. I will look into the political side of it and see
what sort of a concession I can get for you. I should think ten per
cent of the output would satisfy them, and they would, of course, admit
machinery and plant free of duty."

Six months after this communication had arrived in New York City, the
Valencia Mining Company was formally incorporated, and a man named Van
Antwerp, with two hundred workmen and a half-dozen assistants, was sent
South to lay out the freight railroad, to erect the dumping-pier, and
to strip the five mountains of their forests and