"No?" Harry mopped his forehead again. "Well, maybe you 're right. Maybe you 're wrong. But whatever you did—well, that's just the thing I would 'ave done."
"Thanks, Harry."
"Only—" and Harry was staring lugubriously at the vein above him, "it's going to take us a long time to get two hundred thousand dollars out of things the wye they stand now."
"But—"
"I know what you're thinking—that there's silver 'ere and that we 're going to find it. Maybe so. I know your father wrote some pretty glowing accounts back to Beamish in St. Louis. It looked awful good then. Then it started to pinch out, and now—well, it don't look so good."
"But this is the same vein, is n't it?"
"I don't know. I guess it is. But it's pinching fast. It was about this wye when we first started on it. It was n't worth much and it was n't very wide. Then, all of a sudden, it broadened out, and there was a lot more silver in it. We thought we 'd found a bonanza. But it narrowed down again, and the old standard came back. I don't know what it's going to do now—it may quit altogether."
"But we 're going to keep at it, Harry, sink or swim."
"You know it!"
"The Rodaines have hit—maybe we can have some good luck too."