They all stepped out and looked down. The situation of the mine mouth, or cave mouth, was rather peculiar. The cliff which formed the western boundary of the gulch was not perpendicular; it was in steps or ledges; and the cave opening was on a level with one of these ledges, which was, perhaps, eight or ten feet wide in front of the cave mouth, forming a sort of dooryard to the opening. From that ledge to the steep slope below, there was a drop of maybe twelve or fifteen feet, and this had made a convenient dumping arrangement for the old prospector. All he had had to do was to shove his waste diggings out to the edge of the ledge and let them drop.
Larry looked over the dumping edge at the heap of broken rock below.
“It isn’t any wonder you didn’t connect that pile of rock with this hole up here, Purdy,” he said. “It doesn’t look much like the ordinary mine dump.”
“But whereabouts is the vein?” Dick demanded, and he was so excited that he could hardly talk straight.
Turning back into the cave, they were not long in finding the lode of decomposed quartz. At a point in the natural cavern not more than a dozen feet from the entrance, another and smaller crevice branched off, pitching up-hill at quite a sharp incline and stopping abruptly against a wall of rock at a little distance from its branching point. In this pocket-like tunnel they came upon a worn shovel and a miner’s pick; a hammer with a broken handle, and three stubby rock drills: Brock’s tools, left behind when he had sallied out to begin the desperate struggle for life through the snows. The quartz vein itself was not over a foot wide, but it was exceedingly rich in spots—“lenses,” the mineralogists call them. Even by the poor light of their single candle the boys could see fine, wire-like threads of native gold here and there in the brown mass of the rotten quartz.
For a little time they all lost their heads. It was such a bewildering, astounding thing that the lost mine, which they had all been regarding as more or less of a myth, so far as they were concerned, should turn up this way as a sequel to an adventure into which, as Dick had said, they had been fairly driven by the falling roof in the cave.
“Great Land!” he ejaculated. “Think of this thing lying here unclaimed and unowned for nearly three long years—and with probably dozens of people besides Uncle Billy looking for it! And think of the thousand and one chances we had of missing it! If our camp-fire hadn’t just happened to melt a hole in that ice a month ago; or if we hadn’t gone back yesterday to have a look at the cave; or if—oh, gee! there’s simply no end to the ‘ifs’!”
“I—I guess it just was to be,” said little Purdick, who was not half so much of a fatalist as this remark would seem to indicate. “We were just kicked into it, as you might say.”
“Well,” Dick broke in, all a-nerve to get action of some sort, “what do we do, Larry? Can we post a notice, calling it our discovery, and hustle out to a land office and record it? Or do we have to stay here and do a lot of work on it before we can claim it in our names?”