His curious smile again curved his lips and shot the ends of his
mustache upward, and the influence of that smile remained in the room
when he had closed the door behind him. The financiers gazed at one
another for several minutes in silence, then they turned towards the
coruscating metal that filled the tray.



III

THE GRAND TETON MINE

Away on the western border of Wyoming, in the all but inaccessible
heart of the Rocky Mountains, three mighty brothers, "The Big Tetons,"
look perpendicularly into the blue eye of Jenny's Lake, lying at the
bottom of the profound depression among the mountains called Jackson's
Hole. Bracing against one another for support, these remarkable peaks
lift their granite spires from 12,000 to nearly 14,000 feet into the
blue dome that arches the crest of the continent. Their sides, and
especially those of their chief, the Grand Teton, are streaked with
glaciers, which shine like silver trappings when the morning sun comes
up above the wilderness of mountains stretching away eastward from the
hole.

When the first white men penetrated this wonderful region, and one of
them bestowed his wife's name upon Jenny's Lake, they were intimidated
by the Grand Teton. It made their flesh creep, accustomed though they
were to rough scrambling among mountain gorges and on the brows of
immense precipices, when they glanced up the face of the peak, where
the cliffs fall, one below another, in a series of breathless