easy to explain his hopeful mood, for it appeared that he had knocked about the mountain states for the better part of a lifetime with scarcely more to show for his efforts than what was contained in his lean bag. But the roll of blue prints of his claim, with the little bag of specimen ore, was in his eyes a sure guarantee of fortune.

p. 44

“You’d oughter see my mine,—the Rosy Lee I call it because that was my wife’s name. It’s a winner sure! I’m expecting they’ll break into the vein every blast. May get a wire in Frisco that they’re in, and then you bet I’ll go whooping back to pick up the dollars! The Union, next door to me, so to speak, got some ore that ran forty thousand to the ton—they’ve taken out four millions already.”

He rambled on about “shoots,” “winzes,” p. 45“stopes,” “faults,” and geological formation until he had thoroughly fired the young man’s imagination with the fascinating lure of the search for “metal.” They examined the specimens in the old miner’s bag and talked far into the night while the train panted up the steep grades and the moonlight lay white on the snowdrifts of the mountains outside.

p. 45

“Come back with me, young feller,” the miner said in his simple, expansive manner, “and I’ll show you some life you’ve never seen! . . . It’s kind of lonesome up there now the old woman’s gone. . . . You’ll make money.”

“I’d like to,” Brainard responded warmly. “Nothing better! Perhaps I will some day, but I can’t this trip.”

“Come soon,” the old fellow urged, “or you’ll find me at the Waldorf in your own town.”

Brainard lay awake in his berth long afterwards, listening to the laboring locomotives as they pulled the heavy train over the mountains, rushed through the snowsheds, and emerged occasionally to give glimpses of steep, snowy hillsides. The rarefied air of the lofty altitude had set his pulses humming. So much it seemed had happened to him already since he stepped aboard the train in Jersey City that he could hardly p. 46realize himself. The “boss of the fight trust” and the cheerful miner who had “lost the old woman six months back” and still had faith after a lifetime of disappointments that he would dig a fortune from that “hole up in them hills,” were real experiences to the young man. The simple, natural, human quality of these strangers appealed to him. “It must be the west,” he generalized easily. “I suppose Krutzmacht is the same 

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