ining and canoes and
the north country. He knew what it was to eat flour-baked dampers under
the lee side of a canoe propped among the underbrush, and to drink the
last drop of whiskey within fifty miles. Mr. Smith had mighty little use
for the north. But what he did do, was to buy up enough early potatoes
to send fifteen carload lots into Cobalt at a profit of five dollars a
bag.

Mr. Smith, I say, hung back. But Jeff Thorpe was in the mining boom
right from the start. He bought in on the Nippewa mine even before the
interim prospectus was out. He took a "block" of 100 shares of
Abbitibbi Development at fourteen cents, and he and Johnson, the livery
stablekeeper next door, formed a syndicate and got a thousand shares
of Metagami Lake at 3 1/4 cents and then "unloaded" them on one of the
sausage men at Netley's butcher shop at a clear cent per cent advance.

Jeff would open the little drawer below the mirror in the barber
shop and show you all kinds and sorts of Cobalt country mining
certificates,--blue ones, pink ones, green ones, with outlandish and
fascinating names on them that ran clear from the Mattawa to the Hudson
Bay.

And right from the start he was confident of winning. "There ain't no
difficulty to it," he said, "there's lots of silver up there in that
country and if you buy some here and some there you can't fail to come
out somewhere. I don't say," he used to continue, with the scissors open
and ready to cut, "that some of the greenhorns won't get bit. But if a
feller knows the country and keeps his head level, he can't lose."

Jefferson had looked at so many prospectuses and so many pictures of
mines and pine trees and smelters, that I think he'd forgotten that he'd
never been in the country. Anyway, what's two hundred miles!

To an onlooker it certainly didn't seem so simple. I never knew the
meanness, the trickery, of the mining business, the sheer obstinate
determination of the bigger capitalists not to make money when they
might, till I heard the accounts of Jeff's different mines. Take the
case of Corona Jewel. There was a good mine, simply going to ruin for
lack of common sense.

"She ain't been developed," Jeff would say. "There's silver enough in
her so you could dig it out with a shovel. She's full of it. But they
won't get at her and work her."

Then he'd take a look at the pink and blue certificates of the Corona
Jewel and slam the drawer on them in disgust. Worse than that was
the Sil