"All right," accepted Terry.
"Play fair, now," laughed the professor. "Take your dirt from a good rich spot."
Spots looked mainly all alike to Terry. The hole where he had been digging was laying bare the hard rock, but he scraped up a quantity of dirt and loose splinters from a crevice——
"You're giving me principally rock, aren't you?" criticized the preacher, good-naturedly. "But let it go. I'll be game."
However, as the pan cleared and Terry threw aside the splinters, they both exclaimed. Yellow was plainly visible—and moreover there was a blackish, cindery fragment the size of a crushed hazel-nut that glinted and weighed suspiciously as Terry lingered in the act of tossing it away also.
"Here! Hold on!" And the preacher took it. "Nugget, isn't it? Fifteen or twenty dollars, I'll wager—and ten dollars more in flakes!"
"That's a rich pan, boys, as I reckon," interrupted a voice, accompanied by crunching footsteps and a growl from Shep.
The speaker was a miner over six feet tall and broad in proportion—a veritable giant of a man, in clothes as rough as the roughest, and with a revolver at his belt. In his black-whiskered face his eyes were small and deep-set, and close together, or as close as an enormous nose would permit. He was carrying a sack on his shoulder, which he deposited in order to investigate the pan.
"Yes, sir-ee. A $40 pan, countin' the nugget. Does all your dirt run like that?"
"No, sir; not yet," replied Terry. "But maybe it will when we sluice it."