So this was the real Bill Dale, whom men called Hopeful Bill with their mouths tipped down.
CHAPTER THREE
LUELLA ANNOUNCES
In the beginning of mining booms, accident and freaks of chance are popularly supposed to play the leading rôle. A mule, for instance, played fairy godmother when it let fly its heels and kicked a nub off a ledge of fabulous richness in gold. A man threw a rock at a jack rabbit, and then realized that the rock was heavier than it should be; sought its mates and found a mine. Or a man takes an inadvertent slide down a ledge and lands upon a bonanza.
These things do happen occasionally; and, being ready-made romance, they are seized upon avidly by the teller of tales. So the public comes to believe that chance, and chance alone, discovers the precious minerals and leads men like blind children to the spot; a sort of "Shut-your-eyes-and-open-your-mouth" game played by Fate.
In reality, more mines are found by careful prospecting than are ever given to the world by sheer accident. More and more is science turning prospector, and men go carefully, reading geologic formations, following volcanic breaks and mineral outcroppings. Your desert prospector may eat with his knife and forget to take off his hat in the house, but he can talk you blind on intrusions and sedimentary deposits and the dips, angles and faults of certain mineral formations he knows. Chlorides, "bromides," sulphides,—these things are the shop talk of desert and mountains. Men speak of one another with praise or disparagement, as "knowing rock" or as not knowing rock. And the man who does not know rock is the man who goes about praying for a mule to kick the dirt off a gold outcropping for him.
Bill Dale knew rock. He had spent two years, more or less, prospecting on the southern slope of Parowan, because there was a "break" running across, and because, in the lower end of a wash that had many feeders wrinkled into the mountainside, he had picked up a few pieces of "float" carrying free gold in such quantity that it would mean a real bonanza if he found it "in place," which means in a continuous vein leading to the main body that produced it.
As a bystander he had observed the boom at Goldfield, Tonopah, and at other lesser points. His father had been rich in a boom town for a few weeks. Then he had been a broken, old pauper until he died. Wherefore, Bill Dale did not want a premature boom, nor any boom at all. He wanted to find the ledge or vein that had produced that float, so that he would have something tangible to offer Doris Hunter,—in case he ever found courage enough to offer her anything. He knew that he was liked by the Hunters; but he also knew that as a prospective husband for Doris he was never for one moment seriously considered. Don Hunter, her father, was a stockman. He did not believe much in mines, and he looked askance, from a business viewpoint, at any man who spent good, working days in prospecting the desert. It was the most insidious, the most hopeless form of gambling, according to Don Hunter. He would rather see a man sit down to poker and play for a living than to see him wallowing around like a badger, digging holes in a sidehill looking for wealth.