One night, in Casey's Hotel, I almost made a fortune. One always "almost" makes a fortune in a mining camp. On this occasion I was playing roulette when a Chicago capitalist approached me and suggested that I join a syndicate which was about to lease a property of great potential value. To get in would cost me $5,000. Just as I was about to pay down the money Brewer arrived on the scene and dragged me away unceremoniously. He told me more than $40,000 had already been sunk in the property and although they had gone down to a depth of nearly one thousand feet they had not discovered even a tomato can. "Do you expect to find tomato cans as far down in the bowels of the earth as that?" I am afraid Brewer doubted the ingenuousness of my credulity as I asked this question--blandly. Brewer persuaded me to keep out of the syndicate. The Chicago capitalist and his few associates in the succeeding nine months each took $1,250,000 out of this property and the price of the stock rose from $2 to $20 a share! I put my all into Triangle. We bought a controlling interest for fifteen cents a share and then bulled the stock on the Goldfield exchange until it sold at more than one dollar a share. This was making money fairly fast. The whole thing was accomplished in about four months! I journeyed back to New York and quickly told all my friends to get aboard. Expert engineers had told me that at the one-hundred-foot level they had struck ore averaging $40 a ton. When the public received this illuminating bit of information the stock rose to $1.50. I bought some at that price! Previously I had bought more than 100,000 shares with my partners and as many more on my own account at varying prices from fifteen cents up. The engineers were strictly truthful. They had found forty-dollar ore all right. But my partners neglected to inform me that they had carefully placed it where it was found! That was my introduction to the gentle art of "salting" a mine. Ever since, at the mere mention of the word mine there comes a brackish taste in my mouth. They had taken their profits when the stock was selling at one dollar and had gone short 100,000 shares above this price; in fact they were the sellers of all the stock I purchased above the dollar price! Happily they were unable to control the upward trend of the market. As fast as they sold short I bought. Their stock got away from them. When they were called on to deliver what they had sold they had not one share and were forced to call upon me for help. Thinking they were in a hole merely because of innocent blunders I loaned them 100,000 shares for $4,000.