"Yes, and look what happened to copper when the war broke out?" cried Bunker Hill derisively, "it went down to eleven cents. But is it down to eleven now? Well, not so you'd notice it--thirty-one would be more like it--and all on account of the metal trust. They smashed copper down, then bought it all up, and now they're boosting the price. Well, they'll do the same with silver." "Aw, you're crazy," came back Big Boy, "they need copper to make munitions to sell to those nations over in Europe; but what can you make out of silver?" "Oh, nothing," jeered Bunker, "but I'll tell you what you _can_ do--you can use it to pay for your copper! You hadn't figured that out, now had you? Well, here now, let me tell _you_ a few things. These people that are running the metal-buying trust are smart, see--they look way ahead. They know that after we've grabbed all the gold away from Europe those nations will have to have some other metal to stand behind their money--and that metal is going to be silver. The big operators up in Tonopah ain't selling their silver now, they're storing it away in vaults, because they know in a little while all the nations in the world are going to be bidding for silver. And say, do you see that line of hills? There's silver enough buried underneath them to pay the national debt of the world." He paused and nodded his head impressively and Big Boy broke into a grin. "Say," he said, "you must have some claim for sale, like an old feller I met over in New Mex. "'W'y, young man,' he says when I wouldn't bite, 'you're passing up the United States Mint. If you had Niagara Falls to furnish the power, and all hell to run the blast furnace, and the whole State of Texas for a dump, you couldn't extract the copper from that property inside of a million years. It's big, I'm telling you, it's big!' And all he wanted for his claim was a thousand dollars, down." "Aw, you make me tired," confessed Bunker Hill frankly, now that he saw his sale gone glimmering, "I see you're never going to get very far. You'll tramp back to Globe and blow in your money and go back to polishing a drill. W'y, a young man like you, if he had any ambition, could buy one of these claims for little or nothing and maybe make a fortune. I'll tell you what I'll do--you stay around here a while and look at some of my claims; and if you see something you like----"