He still found it impossible to get rid of his straddling, side-wheeling walk, the memory of saddle and bit and dancing cayuse bred to the range game.
Meanwhile, the unknown ingredient of the Yankee Doodle Glory had become the scientific sensation of the hour.
Many a learned body, many a mining school, from Columbia to Denver, either asked for ore samples or sent trained men to make a personal examination of the mine in the Hoodoos.
But nobody was able to discover the nature of the foreign ingredient, not even Conrad Sturtzel, the German chemist in New York, to whom Garrett had appealed and who had an international reputation.
Newson Garrett, though, had been right when he had told Tom that the presence of the unknown metal would not interfere with the mine itself. The underground work progressed speedily and well. The ore smelted without the slightest trouble, and though the miners at first complained of the same sensations, like an echo far-off that had scared "Old Man" Truex away from the Hoodoos and into the uncharted wilds of the Elk River district, they had no lasting ill consequences, no consequences of any sort for that matter.
"It's simply as if you were sand-hogging in a tunnel below a river bed," said Gamble, the engineer, and even that Conrad Sturtzel explained by a lengthy article in the American Ore Age in which he proved, very scientifically and long-windedly, that tunnels laid at a certain pitch acted as reservoirs for tone waves and that the foreign ingredient had of course nothing whatever to do with the curious sensation; an opinion which, since it was signed with Sturtzel's name, was accepted by the scientific and mining world.
Thus the double marvel, the financial one of Tom's
