“Yes, I suppose smelting companies were cheated out of hundreds of thousands and perhaps millions of dollars by crooked sampling deals in the old days,” said one old-time prospector. “And, on the other hand, certain practices of theirs shortened up the profits of the miners considerably, so I guess it was about an even break. “You see, the old-fashioned sampling of ore was done this way: The ore haulers drove across the hills from the mines to the smelter, hauling the ore in great, heavy wagons. At the smelter the custom was to sample ten to one-hundred-ton lots of the ore. The wagons would drive up to the smelter, and the husky hauler would throw one shovelful into the sample bin, then three shovelfuls into the general bin, in succession, until the load was exhausted. “Some of the smelting companies beat the miners out of a good deal of money by always turning in an assay report a little below that of the miner. Then they’d offer to split the difference. Supposing the miner split with the company on a two-ounce difference in silver smelting; that would make one hundred ounces to the hundred ton. With silver at $1.19 an ounce, which it sold for in the old days, that made $120 lost to the miner with the smelting of every hundred-ton lot, the sum being put into the pocket of the smelter owners. “One way some of the miners got it back on the smelting companies was in the loading of their sample wagons. They would put a layer of the highest-grade ore procurable in the bottom of the wagons. Then they’d fill them up with lower-grade ore. When the hauler bent his broad back over the shovel at the smelter he had a distinct understanding with his employer that he was to shovel from the bottom of the wagon into the sampling bin and from the top into the general bin. “Old One-eyed Ike, of Leadville, pulled a very neat trick on a smelter company. Ike made a strike in his silver mine. A good deal of it was just a fair grade of ore--nothing wonderful. But Ike wanted to get rich quick. So he fixed up a rubber bulb, which he fastened under his arm with a long tube running under his coat sleeve to his left hand. “The bulb was full of chloride of silver. When the sample would get down small, Ike would press his arm on the bulb and add a good deal of weight to the sample with the silver that would rush out of the tube. He got by with this trick for months. But finally the smelter people began to think that Ike’s samples were running pretty high. So they began to watch him. They couldn’t find a thing wrong, except that he wore his old blue coat right through the hottest days. “Ike was mopping the sweat from his brow with his old red bandanna one sultry August noon, when a bee lit on his left hand and crawled up his sleeve. An expression of agony stole into Ike’s one bleary eye. He squeezed the bee through his coat sleeve, but it only stung harder.