to keep him goin' for a while, an' then pick up
his stakes an' git! It wasn't jest the money Father was after. He
liked huntin' after gold, jest for the sake o' huntin'. I've seen him
quit a claim that was makin' a fair profit an' start off prospectin',
for the sake o' the change. The wilder the spot, the more chance there
was o' findin' gold, he used to say; the fewer the folks, the bigger
the clean-up. Looked like he was right, too, placer fields peter out
mighty fast when a gang gets there."

"They are bound to," Owens agreed.

"But why? There ain't no rule about gold. One placer'll give up
millions in dust, an' another ain't worth pannin'."

"There's no rule that will tell you where to find placer gold," the
mine-owner corrected, "but don't run away with the idea that gold
deposits are all freaks. As a matter of fact, there is a regular
science to help a good prospector in hunting for reef or quartz gold.
Whether he will find it in sufficient quantity to make the deposit
worth working is quite another matter.

"You mustn't think, Jim, that gold happens to be in one place and
happens not to be in another as a result of mere chance. There's no
chance in Nature. We think there is, sometimes, merely because the
factors are so terribly complicated that we can't follow them all.

"What makes the finding of gold seem so much a matter of luck is not
because we don't know how the gold came to be where it is, but because
we can't know the whole history of the Earth before Man came, and we
can't read everything from the rocks which crop out on the surface.
But we have some clues, and if you studied out the big money-making
gold-mines of to-day, you would find that chance has played but a
small part in their discovery and no part at all in their working.

"A lucky prospector may have been the first to find signs of gold in
the region, but most likely, he got but little out of it. It was the
scientific search which followed that revealed the location of the
great rock deposits below in which the gold was thinly scattered, and
it was highly specialized mining engineering which made them possible
to work. There are mines where ores containing only two dollars'
worth of gold (48 grains, a tenth of an ounce) to the ton are
successfully handled, and the greater part of the big gold-mines run
along quite comfortably on five dollars' worth."

"You mean on a quarter of an ounce o' gold to the ton!" exclaimed Jim,
amazed. "I've