Page:Dick Hamilton's Fortune.djvu/228

216 "How do youse tell a fake gold mine?" asked Tim. "Is it like a lead nickel or counterfeit money so youse can tell by bitin' a chunk of it?"

"Hardly," replied Dick, with a laugh. "I've been reading up about mines lately, and, according to the book, the most common way of making a fake mine is to 'salt' it, or *sweat' it."

"Salt it?" repeated Frank. "I've heard of salting cattle, but never mines."

"That doesn't describe it very well," went on Dick, "but that's what they call it. Sometimes it is termed 'sweating.' By either way it means making the ore in the mine look as if it was filled with gold, when, in fact, the gold had only been put there by some man who wanted a worthless mine to look like a good one."

"How do they do it?" asked Tim.

"The most common way is to take some real gold dust, put it into a shotgun, load it heavily with powder and shoot it at the side of the mine. The gold particles are shot into the rock a little way and it appears like real ore. They do this several times down the sides of a rocky mine and it looks very much like the real thing. After a man has bought the mine and begins to dig, he discovers it's all a fake."

"Wow!" exclaimed Tim. "T'ink of shootin' gold out of a gun. I wish somebody'd take a few shots at me. Easy ones, of course, so's I could live to enjoy it."

"There are other ways of making fake mines,"