“When I run a fifty foot tunnel into a ledge of antimony over on the Skookumchuck it looked like somethin’ good.” Uncle Bill added drily: “I ain’t excited.”
“It might be one of them rar’ minerals.” Yankee Sam hefted it judicially. “What do you hold it at?”
“Anything I can git.”
“You ought to git ten thousand dollars easy when Capital takes holt.”
“I’d take a hundred and think I’d stuck the feller, if I could git cash.”
“A hundred!” Yankee Sam flared up in instant wrath. “It’s cheap fellers like you that’s killin’ this camp!”
“Mortification had set in on this camp ’fore I ever saw it, Samuel,” replied Uncle Bill calmly. “I was over in the Buffalo Hump Country doin’ assessment work fifteen hundred feet above timber-line when the last Live One pulled out of Ore City. They ain’t been one in since to my knowledge. The town’s so quiet you can hear the fish come up to breathe in Lemon Crick and I ain’t lookin’ for a change soon.”
“You wait till spring.”
“I wore out the bosoms of two pair of Levi Strauss’s every winter since 1910 waitin’ for spring, and I ain’t seen nothin’ yet except Capital makin’ wide circles around Ore City. This here camp’s got a black eye.”
“And who give it a black eye?” demanded Yankee Sam wrathfully. “Who done it but knockers like you? I ’spose if Capital was settin’ right alongside you’d up and tell ’em you never saw a ledge yet in this camp hold out below a hundred feet?”