shares of Metagami Lake at 3 1/4 cents and then "unloaded" them on
one of the sausage men at Netley's butcher shop at a clear cent per
cent advance.

Jeff would open the little drawer below the mirror in the barber shop
and show you all kinds and sorts of Cobalt country mining
certificates,--blue ones, pink ones, green ones, with outlandish and
fascinating names on them that ran clear from the Mattawa to the
Hudson Bay.

And right from the start he was confident of winning. "There ain't
no difficulty to it," he said, "there's lots of silver up there in
that country and if you buy some here and some there you can't fail
to come out somewhere. I don't say," he used to continue, with the
scissors open and ready to cut, "that some of the greenhorns won't
get bit. But if a feller knows the country and keeps his head level,
he can't lose."

Jefferson had looked at so many prospectuses and so many pictures of
mines and pine trees and smelters, that I think he'd forgotten that
he'd never been in the country. Anyway, what's two hundred miles!

To an onlooker it certainly didn't seem so simple. I never knew the
meanness, the trickery, of the mining business, the sheer obstinate
determination of the bigger capitalists not to make money when they
might, till I heard the accounts of Jeff's different mines. Take the
case of Corona Jewel. There was a good mine, simply going to ruin for
lack of common sense.

"She ain't been developed," Jeff would say. "There's silver enough in