CHAPTER III
THE UNKNOWN METAL
A long career as chemist and assayer had made a pessimist and misanthrope of Newson Garrett.
Miners had come to his laboratory and had offered him large, certified checks, asking nothing of him in return except that he should rectify his reports by taking off a couple of figures from the rubric entitled Silica and add them to that labeled Gold. Other miners had proposed to kill him on the spot when he told them that what they had taken for virgin gold were only shimmering, deceptive bits of iron crystal, Still others, told by him that they had struck it rich, went straightway on a lengthy spree in the old Cœur d'Alene Theater to wake up a week later with a splitting headache and a brown taste, and to discover on returning to their mines that somebody had jumped their claims in the meantime.
So he was morose and silent.
"It'll take another Treadwell, another Leroy, to make me excited," he used to say at the Club over his glass of Vichy and milk, "and those days are over. Why, to-day a fellow thinks he's all the Guggenheims rolled into one and multiplied by the sum total of all the Vanderbilts when his stuff runs two ounces to the ton!"
But, five days later, when Tom Graves ambled into his office, still dressed as if he had just come fresh
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