Gordon, as he answered, made an effort to speak in a perfectly casual tone. "Why," he said easily, "as I say, I'd make the par very low, say five dollars a share. Then, of course, to give everybody a show, you'd have to have plenty of stock. I don't really care about the exact amount. I haven't given that much thought; but I should say, off hand, perhaps a million shares would be about right." Mason stared at him in blank astonishment. "A million shares!" he gasped. "You'd capitalize the Ethel at five million dollars. God, man, you're crazy!" Gordon flushed. "I guess one of us is crazy," he retorted, with some heat, "and I don't think I'm the one. I keep telling you you'd do a lot better to leave the whole market end of this thing to me. Why, half the people that'll buy our stock won't know how many shares there are, won't know what the par is, won't know a single identical thing about the mine except what I tell 'em in my advertisements. What's more, if we offered to tell 'em every single thing we know about the mine, they wouldn't care to take the trouble to listen. They're not buying shares in a copper mine. They're scraping together money enough to take a little flier, on margin, of course, something they mean to hold for a day or a week or maybe a month, and get out of at the first decent chance. The whole damned market's nothing but a big gamble, anyway, and everybody knows it, and what we're offering's a hundred times more legitimate than most of the stock deals people frame up, because, when all's said and done, we've got a genuine mine behind us. Still, we're not taking all this trouble just for our health, and we can use money just as well as anybody else. And the way to get the money, as I'm now trying to drive into your heads for about the tenth time, is to launch our mine with a big capitalization and a low par." He stopped abruptly. Harrison, indeed, looked somewhat impressed, but Mason shook his head. "No, sir," he said stubbornly, "I know just a little mite about the market myself, and I don't say but what, if anybody's goin' to get skun, I wouldn't rather kinder give ourselves the benefit of the doubt, but five million dollars for the Ethel,"--he straightened up in his chair in his excitement--"five million dollars! Why, that's so damned unreasonable they're ain't no good tryin' to argue about it. When do you expect to pay a dividend on your million shares, I'd like to know?"