Fifty feet farther on he plopped into a second prospect hole, and a little beyond that he found a third.
He noted now that in all cases no chaparral grew up through the muck that had been thrown out. This would seem to signify that the work had been done in recent years, while the bushes that now claimed the land still grew there. He found a fourth hole soon, and near it were manzanita stumps, the tops of which had been cut off with an ax.
This settled it. While the soil might show evidences of the work of man for an interminable length of time, the roots of the lopped-off manzanitas would rot in a decade, perhaps, and freezing weather would loosen the stumps from their moorings. But this wood was still sound. The prospecting had been done not many years before. And who had been prospecting thus on patented land?
When he had wormed his way to the crest of a hill he had passed about twenty of these shallow holes. Now, at the top, the earth had been literally gophered. The workings here looked newer still; and presently he came upon evidence that proved work had been done not longer than a year before, for dry leaves still clung to the tops of manzanita bushes that had been chopped off and pitched to one side.
It has been stated that he was not a miner. Still, having been born and raised in a mining country, he knew something of the geological formations in which gold ordinarily is found. He was in a gold producing country now, yet the specimens that he picked up near the prospect holes proved that only a rank tenderfoot would have searched so persistently in this locality.
He picked up a bit of white substance and gave it study. It resembled lithia. The water of his spring contained a trace of lithium salts, according to the analysis furnished him by the State Agricultural College, to which he had mailed a sample. He pocketed the specimen for future reference.
As he sat on the edge of this hole, with his feet in it, he heard a rustling in the bushes close at hand. At first he thought it might be caused by a jackrabbit; but soon it became certain that some heavier, larger body was making its way slowly through the chaparral.
A coyote? A bobcat? A deer?
He carried no gun today, and the swift thought of a mountain lion was a bit unpleasant.
He quickly slid from his seat and stretched himself on the ground in the shallow excavation. Oliver was an ardent student of nature, and he liked nothing better than secretly to watch some wild thing as it moved about it its customary routine, unconscious of the gaze of human eyes. Once he had hidden in wild grapevines and watched a skunk searching for bugs along a creekbed, until suddenly the moist bank crumbled beneath him, and he fell, and—But what followed is what might be called an unsavory story.