Show I 1 the prospector prospecto r and his burro uh your disconsolate appearance as you stand in the corral with the barley sack only a foot out of your reach said the prospector to his burro makes me think of the small mine owner who is on the very verge of success who has the ore in sight with a mill on the ground but who is down to the last penny and cannot raise enough money to pay miners to take out the ore or buy the fuel necessary to run the mill to all intent and purposes this man is in your boots so to speak f for or he is hog tied haltered and faces a stone wall you cannot get to the barley sack and he cannot realize on the ore he has ir ill sight with a mill standing ready to treat it of course continued the prospector you are of the opinion that the mine own er should do something to find a way out of his difficulty and that as he has nearly a full hand he should draw a suite out of the pack this is all very easy to say but difficult to perform for it is almost an impossibility to rake in the chips when the dealer has the ace up his sleeve in the mining game the man of means is in the same position as the dealer in a faro game and he holds the destiny of a mining proposition in his hands the mine may be all right with thousands in sight and the mill may be ready to turn the metallic contents of the ore into bullion into the royal token that rules the destinies of the world but if the ore is not extracted and taken to the mill if the power is not supplied to the crushers and the stamps and the mill set in motion the whole proposition is as worthless as an arizona state constitution containing a clause for the recall of judges I 1 1 I see that you seem interested in what I 1 am saying and would lilie like to hear of an instance where a mining man was so close to a fortune that he could almost draw on it through his bank and so I 1 will relate an incident coming to my notice a few years bears ago just before the late panic which gave a painful twist to the tall tail of the fm fill ancial world and which cut down the allowance of the prospector and made it harder for a burro to get a fair lookin look in at the barley sack the man I 1 speak of had acquired a group of most promising gold claims some fifty miles from any railroad he was a hog for work and devoted about five years in the development of his prop eity during which he blocked out a large I 1 tonnage of pay rock then he succeeded in interesting capital to the extent of installing a five stamp mill and was just about to begin ore treatment when the orash crash came that I 1 have alluded to at first it was nas thought that this panicky feeling would soon pass over and his associates promised that the means would be forthcoming as soon as the financial skies cleared a little but the clearing failed to come instead and to make matters worse the situation was intensified by a great hurrah about the methods of rockefeller the tobacco trust rebating by the railroads reciprocity agitation and tariff legislation so that the man with the mine ready for production and the mill ready tor for the first dropping of the stamps is still waiting vai ting for his associates to come through nath ith the few thousands necessary to make the alie initial run and they cannot come through because they cannot interest people who only a short time ago were ready and anxious to take hold of an enterprise so inviting in its character and so the mining man can only chew the cud of impatience the same as you the colored wrapping from a tomato can and wait until times are more propitious for the consummation of enterprises which had nearly reached a paying basis when the lite late crash came 1 I want vant to tell you old long ears concluded the prospector it is a most discouraging cou raging thin thing to be so near success that it seems beems as if in another minute one will have a big roll in his hands and there vre re many who give up at the critical and disastrous minute when all hope seems to have bave melted away but one should never despair for at any hour at any moment assistance may be forthcoming for the starting up of the mine and the mill when the mining I 1 man will get his reward and the burro his barley and there you are and then some |