had said two dollars per sample they had told him to
go right ahead. The professor was not, I suppose, a mercenary man, but
it pleased him to think that he could, clean up sixteen dollars in a
single evening in his laboratory. It showed, at any rate, that
businessmen put science at its proper value. Strangest of all was the
fact that the men had told him that even this ore was apparently
nothing to what there was; it had all come out of one single spot in
the creek, not the hundredth part of the whole claim. Lower down, where
they had thrown the big dam across to make the bed dry, they were
taking out this same stuff and even better, so they said, in cartloads.
The hydraulic dredges were tearing it from the bed of the creek all
day, and at night a great circuit of arc lights gleamed and sputtered
over the roaring labour of the friends of geological research.

Thus had the Erie Auriferous Consolidated broken in a tidal wave over
financial circles. On the Stock Exchange, in the downtown offices, and
among the palm trees of the Mausoleum Club they talked of nothing else.
And so great was the power of the wave that it washed Tomlinson and his
wife along on the crest of it, and landed them fifty feet up in their
thousand-dollar suite in the Grand Palaver. And as a result of it
"mother" wore a beetle-back jacket; and Tomlinson received a hundred
telegrams a day, and Fred quit school and ate chocolates.

But in the business world the most amazing thing about it was the
wonderful shrewdness of Tomlinson.

The first sign of it had been that he had utterly refused to allow the
Erie Auriferous Consolidated (as the friends of geology called
themselves) to take over the top half of the Tomlinson farm. For the
bottom part he let them give him one-half of the preferred stock in the
company in return for their supply of development capital. This was
their own proposition; in fact, they reckoned that in doing this they
were trading about two hundred thousand dollars' worth of machinery
for, say ten million dollars of gold. But it frightened them when
Tomlinson said "Yes" to the offer, and when he said that as to common
stock they might keep it, it was no use to him, they were alarmed and
uneasy till they made him take a block of it for the sake of market
confidence.

But the top end of the farm he refused to surrender, and the friends of
applied geology knew that there must be something pretty large behind
this refusal; the more so