"Cost too much to work, and there's no money in it. You know the old saying about gold mines, don't you?" "No, what is it?" "That 'A copper mine will bring you gold; silver, silver; but a gold mine will only bring you a few coppers!'" "I never heard that before," replied the lad, "and it sounds queer, too." "Well, it's true. I wouldn't mind betting," said the old pioneer, "that there's more gold been put into gold mines than ever was taken out of them." "How's that?" "Well, you take it all through. There's the time and money spent by the thousands of prospectors that spend all their lives wandering up and down the mountains trying to locate the gold. Then, when a vein is found, some fellow's got to put in a lot of capital to start to work it, and thousands have to be spent for machinery to crush it, before it is at all certain that the mine will pay. Then, in order to raise this money, brokers all over the United States are selling shares of these mines, and they make a good living out of it. And when you think how many tens of thousands of dollars are spent on each mine, and how many thousands of mines there are which have proved dead failures, and over and beyond this, how narrow the margin of profit is even on a successful strike, it doesn't look like much of a paying business, eh?" The trail becoming too rough at this point for riding side by side, the boy dropped behind, thinking over the difference between the finding of gold as it really is, and as his adventurous ideas had supposed it to be. When the trail widened again the boy cantered up, and continued the former subject with the remark: "Are your mines copper, then?" "No, azurite." "What's that?" asked the boy, who had never heard of it before. "It's a sort of stone that they make up into all sorts of jewels that women wear. Of course it's not precious like sapphire and emerald and all that sort of thing, but that's perhaps because it is not as well known, nor as rare. It's just as pretty, I think. I'd rather have it than a gold mine or a copper mine, either, for that matter." "Why?" asked Roger. "Because it can be worked so easily. You see a small box of that stuff can be packed on a mule any distance and then shipped, and if a different point is used each time no one knows where it comes from and there is no competition. Now copper, you see, is only valuable in large quantities, and it needs a big industry to run it. And of this rarer sort of stuff, there's lots of it around for any one that wants to look for it." "What sort of stuff?" "All these rare mineral earths. The clay that's used in making gas mantles, for instance; or there's tungsten, which is worth a lot now for making the wires of incandescent light. I've a friend who's rich because he got hold of a deposit of tungsten from reading the Geological Survey bulletins. There's a lot more of it in the Snake Range of Nevada, just waiting for somebody who's got energy enough to go ahead and develop it."