CHAPTER XVII—THE MAN IN THE CABIN
Why, of course they could not keep it to themselves! At least, the three girls could not. They simply had to tell Miss Cullam and Tom, and the other Ardmore freshmen and Ann of their discovery.
So every day after that the visitors from the East “went prospecting.” They searched up and down the creek for several miles, turning over every bit of “sparkling” rock they saw and bringing back to the camp innumerable specimens of quartz and mica, until Mr. Hammond declared they were all “gold mad.”
“Why, this place has been petered out for years and years,” he said. “Do you suppose I want my actors leaving me to stake out claims along Freezeout Creek, and spoiling my picture? Stop it!”
The idea of gold hunting had got into the girls, however, as well as into Flapjack Peters and his daughter. The other Western men laughed at them. Gold this side of the Hualapai Range had “petered out.” They looked upon the old-timer as a little cracked on the subject. And, of course, these “tenderfoots” did not know anything about “color” anyway.
Even Miss Cullam searched along the creek banks and up into the low hills that surrounded the valley.
“Who knows,” said the teacher of mathematics, “but that I may find a fortune, and so be able to eschew the teaching of the young for the rest of my life? Gorgeous!”
“But pity the ‘young’,” begged Jennie Stone. “Think, Miss Cullam, how we would miss you.”
“I can hardly imagine that you would suffer,” declared the mathematics teacher. “Really!”
“We might not miss the mathematics,” said Rebecca, wickedly. “But you are the very best chaperon who ever ‘beaued’ a party of girls into the wilds. Isn’t that the truth, Ardmores?”