The Bottineau courant. (Bottineau, Bottineau County, N.D.) 1895-1929, 1922-01-05
CHAPTER II.
A Needle In a Haystack.

Since my happy hunting-ground be-
gan in the middle of Colorado, T took
q ticket to Denver by way of Chicago
and Omaha, AS I recall it now, 1t was
after the train had passed North
Platte that / first became sensibly con-
.scious, as you might say. of the fact
that the man in the opposite section of
the s~leeping-car had a little Pullman
table set up in front of him. and was
studying ,maps-and blue-prints. He
was a rather eficient-looking fellow Of
maybe thirty-tWo or three. with dark
hair and eyes, and what Lisette would
have called a determined nose, and he
sported a. beard and mustaches, nut
brown as to color, and neatly trimmed.
: Farther along we me- in the smoking
room, at atime when the stuffy little
den had no other occupants. Mr.. OPP
posite Sections only cigar turned out
to have a broken wrapper. so l natural
~ rendered my WI pocket-case. That
served to break the ice and we talked,
dribbiing along from one commonplace
to another until finally Brown-beard
said
"You don't by any chance happen to
be a mining engineer, do you?"
7"Far be it. from me-" I laughed !;
nothing so useful as that"
II didn't know" he fastened to say,
half alphabetically. Il saw you study
ing maps as we came along"
Now, ordinarily I'm apt to talk a lot
too much about my own affairs-TlI
admit it; but this was n time when
I had a sort of bunch not to. So I
merely said: ~,
II saw you doing the same thing"
"Sure you did," he admitted cheer
fully. Then he told me his name
which / got as Bullion, or Bulletin, or
something like that-and. said he was
a mining engineer, which was the rea-
son why he had asked me If / wasn't
one. - 1
Past that, the talk ran mostly upon
his profession, and since the mysteri-
GUS bunch was still nudging me, I let
him have the floor, so to speak, fgur-
ing chiefly myself as a good listener.
"Yes; we do run across some rather
queer propositions in Jul trade" he
said. after he had given me ONE sort
Of an idea Of what a mining engineers
job is like. 'In my own experience,
for example, the only sure shot 1 have
ever had-or possibly ever will have
got away from me"
1t was up to me to. bite, and, Of
course, / did it.
"How was that?" rs
1.-THE man died." he replied laconi-
caIly. VI #Nr
That sounded rather interesting, so
I gave him another pinch.
"Tell me about It; If it won't bore
you"
He grinned northumberland &C.
.cepted another cigar out of my pocket
case. -" + IT g = - FL
you'll be the one to be bored. 1t
was this way: A little over a year
ago / was on my way to Chicago with
report that / had been making on
some properties in the Cripple Greek
district. In the Denver Omaha Pull
man I fell In with a nice old gentle
man who had been buying himself a
gold brick In the shape of a flooded
mine. The mine had ait one time been
q producer though not by any mean
what you'd call . Bonanza After a
rather extended dividend-paying period
II don't know just how long, though
it was some y~ears--the luck changed,
as sometimes happens. In sinking and
drifting the operators had uncovered
another vein which was exceedingly
rich. Don't let me talk your arm off"
Go ahead" said !. my arms are
insured. !" 8
sWeIl, at about the time that they
struck this new underlying vein, they
also struck water: 80 much OF it as to.
lead them to suspect that they had
tapped an underground lake. The old
gentleman wasn't exactly a woody
sheep--in the Wall Street sense Of the
term. He had owned stock in the mine
for d long time, and ii had been pay
Ing him dividends. right along. SO.
naturally, after the new strike was an
nouneed, he was perfectly willing 10
own more. ! don't know what his In.
~vestnnent was, but he gave me to uns
derstand that Il was something Ike
half d million, In less than Y month
after the deal al closed the mine was
drowned and went out of business.
..StilI, I don't . your lost Oppor-
tunity.a threw IA.
sT'm coming to that. As 1t happens,
my specially as mn engineer Is the un.5
Watering ~ wet mines. The old gem.
uenan had maps and probes with.
him tho records ~ 4 very careful ana
excellent typographical survey. I'm
reasonably certain That i discovered U
way In which that milne 81 be drainedl
az comparatively small expense,
VI told him + thought could do ii;
bnt / didn't rive nv plan Aray. m.
sstsad, made him ! proposittoa of