“All right,” Len answered, his tongue hampered by bunches of the acrid purple berries of the Oregon grape, which not only filled his mouth, but puckered his lips. “Can you trace the outcrop all the way?”
“No, but I’m going to climb up on this slide a little ways, and then have you go back and stand at the edge of the cliff, while Sandy stands midway between us. I can see then whether the vein curves.”
“Why, of course it does,” called out the Scotchman, who had quietly mounted the broken face of the land-slide, until he could overlook the ground. “The vein just follows along the base o’ this low ridge here, and I can see that it curves quite decidedly.”
“What ridge?”
“You can scarcely glint it, I dare say, where you stan’, but come up here, and you will see it plainly. It’s lang and narrow.”
The others mounted to his side, and then could easily discern that a narrow ridge, like the ruins of a big wall which had been made of white rock but now was fallen and overgrown with weeds and briers, stretched in a gentle curve from the brink of the gulch to the foot of the land-slide, where it seemed a trifle narrower than at the cliff.
“And look there,” said Max, pointing with his finger straight across the gulch to the gray wall of the opposite mountain, which seemed to rise almost plumb from the bed of Panther Creek. “Look! Do you see that whitish upright patch, with the darker streaks on each side of it, extending up and down the face of the cliff?”
“Ay,” they assented together, Lennox adding, “It’s like a Kensington panel.”
“Plainly that panel is the continuation of this ridge and the vein, which have been cut through by the creek.
“But there’s another vein on the other side apparently.”