"No worse split than yours," retorted Harry. "And my best boot is better than your best one!"
"We'll have to stay out of sight in the mountains," asserted Terry, "till we get enough dust to buy clothes with."
"Well," said Harry, "here's where we belong. We're all right for Gregory Gulch—and we don't know when to meet the folks, anyway. By the time they turn up we may have our can heaping full from my pies and your wages, or we may be regularly sluicing out the gold from the Golden Prize and the True Blue, and go down to Denver in time to put on broadcloth and brand new boots!"
"If we only had water," sighed Terry.
"That's the one thing that keeps us from being millionaires," sighed Harry. "And it's one thing or another with most people—or else we'd all be millionaires. Counting up beforehand is the easiest part of getting rich."
"Just the same, I know this much," blurted Terry. "Some day all of a sudden George Stanton will come straight into this gulch, with his pick and spade, looking for the gold that he'll say we promised him."
"Then we'll put him to work baking, or digging with you and Pat," laughed Harry.
The mass meeting that evening to hear Horace Greeley speak was a great affair. Everybody went—that is, everybody who wanted to. Clothes did not matter. At least 2,000 people gathered, and they wore all kinds of garb, from buckskin to rags. They stood about, or sat upon the ground and stumps and logs; and Mr. Greeley, in a long whitish coat, addressed them, after having been given three cheers.
He said that his day's trip through the diggin's had convinced him that this was a gold region as rich as California, and now he was of the opinion that a new State should be formed. He urged the miners to work hard and faithfully, and not drink or gamble. It was work instead of gambling and running about that would make them successful. He hoped that they all would live honest, upright lives, just as though their home folks were with them; and if anybody would not so live, he should be placed upon a horse or mule and told to ride and not come back. He said that one purpose in his visiting the Pike's Peak country was to find out the truth regarding the mines; but that another purpose was to cross the continent and get information that would hasten the building of a railway—the Pacific Railway, to extend from the Missouri River to the Pacific Ocean!
Hooray for Horace Greeley! And again hooray!