“Listen, pard. About a year ago I had a notion I’d like to get rich out of this mining game. Riding range was my long suit, but gold mines seemed to offer better prospects. I had five hundred saved up and to my credit in the Tucson bank. The colonel got next to it, and he told me about the ‘Pauper’s Dream’ claim, which needed only a fifty-foot shaft to make it show up a bonanza. I gave the colonel my five hundred, and he got a lot more fellows to chip in. Then the colonel went ahead, built a ten-stamp mill, and started digging the shaft. When that shaft got down fifty feet, ore indications had petered out complete; and when it got down a hundred feet, there wasn’t even a limestone stringer--nothing but country rock, with no more yellow metal than you’d find in the sand at Far Rockaway. I bade an affectionate farewell to my five hundred, and asked my friends to rope-down and tie me, and snake me over to the nearest asylum for the feeble-minded if I ever dropped so much as a two-bit piece into another hole in the ground. After that, I forgot about the colonel and the ‘Pauper’s Dream.’ But things have been happening since I’ve been away from Tucson. Read the letter for yourself, pard. It will explain the whole situation to you. After you read it, tell me what you think. You might go over it out loud, while I sit back here, drink in your words, and try to imagine myself the big high boy with a brownstone front on Easy Street.”