o him with wonderful suddenness. As yet it was
hardly six months old. As to how it had originated, there were all
sorts of stories afloat in the weekly illustrated press. They agreed
mostly on the general basis that Tomlinson had made his vast fortune by
his own indomitable pluck and dogged industry. Some said that he had
been at one time a mere farm hand who, by sheer doggedness, had fought
his way from the hay-mow to the control of the produce market of
seventeen states. Others had it that he had been a lumberjack who, by
sheer doggedness, had got possession of the whole lumber forest of the
Lake district. Others said that he had been a miner in a Lake Superior
copper mine who had, by the doggedness of his character, got a
practical monopoly of the copper supply. These Saturday articles, at
any rate, made the Saturday reader rigid with sympathetic doggedness
himself, which was all that the editor (who was doggedly trying to make
the paper pay) wanted to effect.

But in reality the making of Tomlinson's fortune was very simple. The
recipe for it is open to anyone. It is only necessary to own a hillside
farm beside Lake Erie where the uncleared bush and the broken fields go
straggling down to the lake, and to have running through it a creek,
such as that called Tomlinson's, brawling among the stones and willows,
and to discover in the bed of a creek--a gold mine.

That is all.

Nor is it necessary in these well-ordered days to discover the gold for
one's self. One might have lived a lifetime on the farm, as Tomlinson's
father had, and never discover it for one's self. For that indeed the
best medium of destiny is a geologist, let us say the senior professor
of geology at Plutoria University. That was how it happened.

The senior professor, so it chanced, was spending his vacation near by
on the shores of the lake, and his time was mostly passed--for how
better can a man spend a month of pleasure?--in looking for
outcroppings of Devonian rock of the post-tertiary period. For which
purpose he carried a vacation hammer in his pocket, and made from time
to time a note or two as he went along, or filled his pockets with the
chippings of vacation rocks.

So it chanced that he came to Tomlinson's Creek at the very point where
a great slab of Devonian rock bursts through the clay of the bank. When
the senior professor of geology saw it and noticed a stripe like a mark
on a tiger's back--a fault he called it--that ran over