ike a section of
layer cake between the base of the mountains and the creek and then he
shook his head.

"Nope," he said, "it don't look good to me. The formation runs too
regular. What you need for a big mineral deposit is some fissure veins,
where the country has been busted up more."

"Oh, it don't look like a mineral country at all, eh?" enquired Bunker
Hill sarcastically. "Well, how do you figure it out then that they took
out four million dollars' worth of silver from that little hill right up
the creek?"

"Don't know," answered Big Boy, "but you couldn't work it now, with
silver down to fifty-two cents. It's copper that's the high card now."

"Yes, and look what happened to copper when the war broke out?" cried
Bunker Hill derisively, "it went down to eleven cents. But is it down to
eleven now? Well, not so you'd notice it--thirty-one would be more like
it--and all on account of the metal trust. They smashed copper down,
then bought it all up, and now they're boosting the price. Well, they'll
do the same with silver."

"Aw, you're crazy," came back Big Boy, "they need copper to make
munitions to sell to those nations over in Europe; but what can you make
out of silver?"

"Oh, nothing," jeered Bunker, "but I'll tell you what you _can_
do--you can use it to pay for your copper! You hadn't figured that out,
now had you? Well, here now, let me tell _you_ a few things. These
people that are running the metal-buying trust are smart, see--they look
way ahead. They know that after we've grabbed all the gold away from
Europe those nations will have to have some other metal to stand behind
their money--and that metal is going to be silver. The big operators up
in Tonopah ain't selling their silver now, they're storing it away in
vaults, because they know in a little while all the nations in the world
are going to be bidding for silver. And say, do you see that line of
hills? There's silver enough buried underneath them to pay the national
debt of the world."

He paused and nodded his head impressively and Big Boy broke into a
grin.

"Say," he said, "you must have some claim for sale, like an old feller I
met over in New Mex.

"'W'y, young man,' he says when I wouldn't bite, 'you're passing up the
United States Mint. If you had Niagara Falls to furnish the power, and
all hell to run the blast furnace, and the whole State of Texas for a
dump, you couldn't extract the copper from that property inside of a
million