ut reason,
mines cave and timbers fall; and certainly if there is a God of Ten Per
Cent his just wrath would be visited upon Wiley. Blount knew that great
god and worshipped him continually and he felt certain that something
would happen, for when boys out of college take money away from bank
presidents it comes dangerously close to sacrilege.

"Well, well," murmured Blount, "quite a change, quite a change. Are you
sure that stuff is tungsten, Wiley?"

"Yes," responded Wiley, affecting a becoming modesty to cover up his
youthful smirk. "Would you like to see it tested?"

"Very much," answered Blount, and followed after him to the assay
office, which Wiley had hurriedly fitted up. Wiley took a piece of
scheelite and pounded it in a mortar until it was fine as flour, then
dropped it into a test-tube and boiled it over a flame in a solution of
hydrochloric and nitric acids.

"Now," he said, when the tungstic acid had been dissolved, and he had
dropped a small bar of tin into the solution. It turned a dark blue and
Blount sighed again, for he had looked up the test in advance. "If it
turns blue," a prospector had told him, "like the color of me overalls,
then, sure as hell, it's tungsten."

"Well, well," commented Blount, gazing mildly about, for great men do
not stop to repine, "and what do you use these big scales for?"

"That's for the quantitative test," explained Wiley importantly. "By
weighing the sample first and extracting the tungsten we get the
percentage, when it's been filtered and dried and weighed again, of the
tungstic acid in the ore. But it's quite an elaborate process."

"Yes, yes," assented Blount, still managing to smile pleasantly. "Rather
out of my line, I guess. What per cent do your samples average?"

"Oh, between sixty and seventy when I pick my specimens. I'm rigging up
a jigger to separate the ore until I can get capital to start up the
mill. It ought to be milled, by rights, and only the concentrates
shipped; but while I'm getting started----"

"Oh, draw on me--any time," broke in Blount, smiling radiantly. "I'd be
only too glad to accommodate you. That's my business, you know; loaning
out money on good security, and you're good up to fifty thousand
dollars."

"Do you mean it?" demanded Wiley after a startled silence, and Blount
slapped him heartily on the back.

"Just try me," he said. "I've been looking up the market and tungsten is
simply booming. It's quoted at forty-five for six