In such a struggle there was necessarily much reckless crisscrossing and overlapping. Claims were stepped off on all sides of us and in every conceivable direction. The law requires only the driving of corner stakes and the posting of a notice prior to the preliminary entry; and as soon as a man got his stakes driven and his notice displayed, he became a vanishing point on the horizon, joining a mad race for town and the land office.
The assault upon the harmless mountain-side did not last as long as we both feared it might, and there was no occasion for gun-play. Gifford and I patrolled the boundaries of our claim and made due protest when it became evident that anybody was overlapping us. Before the sun was an hour high the last of the locators had tailed off in the town foot-race; and though there were more coming, the most of these laggards turned back at once at sight of the forest of new stakes.
It was not until after our guard duties had ceased to press upon us that we remembered the wagon-load of precious stuff left at the mercy of a robber world on the bare hillside two miles away. Gifford ran to the shoulder of the over-looking spur with Barrett's field-glass, and I could tell by his actions that the strain was off.
"Dixon is back with another wagon, and he and a helper are transferring the ore sacks," he reported when he came in. "I told him when he left that he might get help wherever he could; that it was no use trying to keep it dark any longer."
There being nothing to prevent it now, we cooked breakfast on the camp stove, sitting afterward to eat it on the shack door-step, with the weapons handy. I think Gifford had quite forgotten that he had raided the shack chuck-box at daybreak. Anyway, his appetite appeared undiminished. He seemed to think that the worst of our troubles were over, and I did not undeceive him. The later stragglers were still tramping over the ground and reading the lately posted notices. A few of them came up to ask questions, and one, a grizzled old fellow who might have posed as "One-eyed Ike" in Western melodramas, stopped to talk a while.
"You boys shore have struck it big," he commented. "How come?"
We explained briefly the finding of the unoccupied ground and the taking of the average Cripple Creek prospector's chance, and he nodded sagely.
"Jest lit down 'twixt two days and dug a hole and struck hit right there at grass-roots, did ye? That's tenderfoots' luck, ever' time. Vein runnin' bigger?"
Gifford admitted that it was, and the one-eyed man begged a bit of tobacco for the filling of his blackened corn-cob pipe.
"Here's hopin'," he said, with true Western magnanimity; then, with a jerk of his head toward the thin column of stack smoke rising on the still morning air from the Lawrenceburg: "I know this here ground, up one side and down the other. Them fellers down yander 'll be grabbin' fer ye, pronto, soon as they know you've struck pay."