n their game, although the stakes were high.

I have said that I never owned a mining share. Well, I never did; but
once I came close to owning a part share in what is now the richest
copper mine on earth--a mine that, with the Anaconda in Montana, almost
determines the price of raw copper. I will tell you the tale.

Along in the middle seventies--I think it was '74, I was partner with a
man named George Stevens at Eureka Springs, west of Fort Thomas in the
Apache country, a trading station for freighters. We were owners of the
trading station, which was some distance south of where the copper
cities of Globe and Miami are now situated. We made very good money at
the station and Stevens and I decided to have some repairs and additions
built to the store. We looked around for a mason and finally hired one
named George Warren, a competent man whose only fault was a fondness for
the cup that cheers.

Warren was also a prospector of some note and had made several rich
strikes. It was known that, while he had never found a bonanza, wherever
he announced "pay dirt" there "pay dirt" invariably was to be found. In
other words, he had a reputation for reliability that was valuable to
him and of which he was intensely vain. He was a man with "hunches," and
hunches curiously enough, that almost always made good.

These hunches were more or less frequent with Warren. They usually came
when he was broke for, like all prospectors, Warren found it highly
inconvenient ever to be the possessor of a large sum of money for any
length of time. He had been known to say to a friend: "I've got a
hunch!" disappear, and in a week or two, return with a liberal amount of
dust. Between hunches he worked at his trade.

When he had completed his work on the store at Eureka Springs for myself
and Stevens, Warren drew me aside one night and, very confidentially,
informed me that he had a hunch. "You're welcome to it, George," I
said, and, something calling me away at that moment, I did not hear of
him again until I returned from New Fort Grant, whither I had gone with
a load of hay for which we had a valuable contract with the government.
Then Stevens informed me that Warren had told him of his hunch, had
asked for a grub-stake, and, on being given one, had departed in a
southerly direction with the information that he expected to make a find
over in the Dos Cabezas direction.

He was gone several weeks, and then one day Stevens said to me, quiet