"Nine years ago, I and Timberline Monroe and Katooter Lemons, from Zion, struck the Feverish Hornet up on Slippery Ellum. First we knew the prospecting season had closed up on us and, as the lay-out for surface had pinched out, we decided to sink on the Hornet, just for luck.
"So Timberline, Katooter and me went over to Huckleberry Oleson's store at at the lower camp and soaked our physiognomy for chuck, and valley-tan, and a blastin' outfit for the job.
"Down five foot she showed 150 colors to a hunk of rock no bigger'n a plug of tobacker, with wall rocks well defined both sides and foot wall slick as a confidence game in 'Frisco.
"The quartz, with a light coat of gouge, looked as if she'd been jammed through the formation like a Sabbath-school scholar's elbow through a custard pie, and it had crushed the prehistoric stuffin' and pre-adamite sawdust out of the geological crust in good shape.
"'Katooter,' says I, 'if she shows up this way all the way down, I be teetotally dodbuttered if I don't think we've cornered the sugar at last. We'll run her down to ten foot and see how she looks to the naked eye.'
"Ten foot down she'd widen to three foot between walls, with solid gray quartz as pretty as a bank book. Then we made a mill run of five pounds in a half-gallon mortar and cleared up a dollar's worth of dust on the blade of a long-handled shovel.
"The prospectus of the Feverish Hornet was very cheering indeed.
"I sat down on a candle-box and sang something. I always twitter a few notes when I feel tickled about anything.
"Katooter listened to my singing a little while, and then he went down the gulch murmuring, something about my music and intimating that prosperity always had its little drawbacks after all.
"He slid down to the Frescoed Hell and jammed his old freckled hide so full of horse liniment of the vintage of '49 that he got entirely off the lead, and drifted so far into poverty rock that he didn't know Timberline nor me from a stomach pump.