of what he called "displacement" mining on the
Yukon.

So you can understand that when the mining boom struck Mariposa,
Jefferson Thorpe was in it right from the very start. Why, no wonder; it
seemed like the finger of Providence. Here was this great silver country
spread out to north of us, where people had thought there was only a
wilderness. And right at our very doors! You could see, as I saw, the
night express going north every evening; for all one knew Rockefeller or
Carnegie or anyone might be on it! Here was the wealth of Calcutta, as
the Mariposa Newspacket put it, poured out at our very feet.

So no wonder the town went wild! All day in the street you could
hear men talking of veins, and smelters and dips and deposits and
faults,--the town hummed with it like a geology class on examination
day. And there were men about the hotels with mining outfits and
theodolites and dunnage bags, and at Smith's bar they would hand chunks
of rock up and down, some of which would run as high as ten drinks to
the pound.

The fever just caught the town and ran through it! Within a fortnight
they put a partition down Robertson's Coal and Wood Office and opened
the Mariposa Mining Exchange, and just about every man on the Main
Street started buying scrip. Then presently young Fizzlechip, who had
been teller in Mullins's Bank and that everybody had thought a worthless
jackass before, came back from the Cobalt country with a fortune, and
loafed round in the Mariposa House in English khaki and a horizontal
hat, drunk all the time, and everybody holding him up as an example of
what it was possible to do if you tried.

They all went in. Jim Eliot mortgaged the inside of the drug store and
jammed it into Twin Tamagami. Pete Glover at the hardware store bought
Nippewa stock at thirteen cents and sold it to his brother at seventeen
and bought it back in less than a week at nineteen. They didn't care!
They took a chance. Judge Pepperleigh put the rest of his wife's money
into Temiskaming Common, and Lawyer Macartney got the fever, too, and
put every cent that his sister possessed into Tulip Preferred.

And even when young Fizzlechip shot himself in the back room of the
Mariposa House, Mr. Gingham buried him in a casket with silver handles
and it was felt that there was a Monte Carlo touch about the whole
thing.

They all went in--or all except Mr. Smith. You see, Mr. Smith had come
down from there, and he knew all about rocks and m