But it made no difference to Jeff, for his mind had floated away
already on the possibilities of what he called "displacement" mining
on the Yukon.

So you can understand that when the mining boom struck Mariposa,
Jefferson Thorpe was in it right from the very start. Why, no wonder;
it seemed like the finger of Providence. Here was this great silver
country spread out to north of us, where people had thought there was
only a wilderness. And right at our very doors! You could see, as I
saw, the night express going north every evening; for all one knew
Rockefeller or Carnegie or anyone might be on it! Here was the
wealth of Calcutta, as the Mariposa Newspacket put it, poured out at
our very feet.

So no wonder the town went wild! All day in the street you could hear
men talking of veins, and smelters and dips and deposits and
faults,--the town hummed with it like a geology class on examination
day. And there were men about the hotels with mining outfits and
theodolites and dunnage bags, and at Smith's bar they would hand
chunks of rock up and down, some of which would run as high as ten
drinks to the pound.

The fever just caught the town and ran through it! Within a fortnight
they put a partition down Robertson's Coal and Wood Office and opened
the Mariposa Mining Exchange, and just about every man on the Main
Street started buying scrip. Then presently young Fizzlechip, who had
been teller in Mullins's Bank and that everybody had thought a
worthless jackass before, came back from the Cobalt country with a
fortune, and loafed round in the Mariposa House in English khaki and
a horizontal hat, drunk all the time, and everybody holding him up as