MAX HAS AN IDEA.
CHAPTER IV.
MAX HAS AN IDEA.
Nobody, of course, would ever deliberately have purchased a piece of mining property about which he knew so little as these lads did about the Last Chance claim. But it must be remembered, that they did not buy after selection, but that the mine was forced quickly upon them, taken, like Hobson’s choice of a horse in the stable which held but one animal, because there was no other pay to be got. Now it was their business to explore the property thoroughly and see what could be made out of it. They knew that many a mine had been abandoned by one owner and yielded a fortune to his successor; it was possible some good might have been overlooked in this one. “No man,” wrote the wise philosopher, Francis Bacon, “prospers so suddenly as by other’s errors.”
At any rate, they proposed to find out all they could about the prospect-hole, and not run away without at least loudly knocking at fortune’s door. A man can endure failure with much composure when he feels that it has been through no lack of diligence on his part, and if success follows, it is all the more satisfactory for having been earned by good judgment and hard work.
Putting into their pockets some pieces of cold bread and a handful apiece of dried fruit, for they did not know how far their search might lead them, they began to climb the steep rocks which formed the wall of the valley, and after a few moments worked their way up to where a less steeply inclined slope stretched onward to the summit of the range. Here, after some difficulty, they were able to discover the crest or outcrop of their vein, and to trace it two or three hundred yards by its occasional appearance at ledges and bare spots among the herbage and heather of short, thick, huckleberry-like bushes, which clothed the mountain-side. At the farther border of this plateau, a huge land-slide, in some long-past spring, had come thundering down from the cliffs above, burying under it all further trace of the vein, no outcropping of which was visible in the rocks again exposed a quarter of a mile beyond, so far as they could make out after a wearisome tramp of investigation.
It was evident that they had not been the first to go over this ground, for nigh under the foot of the land-slide, which was now a bank of richest flowers, some nodding on tall stems in the splendor of purple, scarlet and gold, others equally gaudy but more lowly, bearing blossoms modestly beautiful in white and brown, they found a pit ten or twelve feet deep, sunken into the rock.
The stone which had been thrown out of this pit was examined with great care, and Max even scrambled down to its bottom and flaked off more specimens, which he tossed up with exclamations of rejoicing. They certainly showed a far larger proportion of the brown mineral, in which our prospectors were taking so much interest, than anything that had yet been seen, and strengthened the notion that it increased in plenty the farther the vein was followed.
“Now let us see if we were right about the bending,” Max remarked, when he had climbed out of the prospect-hole.