Without another word the old man took down an old-fashioned lantern from its peg on the wall and lighted it.
“I’m allowin’ maybe you might help me some,” he said, in the same half-wistful tone. “You’re a sort of a minin’ ingineer, ain’t ye?”
“Nothing like it,” Dick denied, with another laugh. “I’ve just finished my first year in college, and I’m not taking ‘Mining,’ at that. But my father owns a half-interest in a gold mine in the Timanyoni, so I’m not exactly a tenderfoot. If I can help you, I’ll be glad to.”
“Lemme show ye,” said his host, and together they left the cabin and, turning aside from the bed of the little stream, climbed a rocky steep beside a huge dump which looked, even in the starlight, like an enormous gray beard hanging from the mountain side.
At the top of the dump the old man led the way into a tunnel, a sizable hole driven, as the lantern light showed, into the solid granite. Once they were fairly inside, the old man lighted a miner’s candle and put the lantern aside. With the better illumination they pushed on into the heart of the mountain. As they went deeper and deeper, Dick marveled at the proof of tireless industry the tunnel exhibited. It was roomy enough to admit of the old man’s walking upright in it, tall as he was, and Dick could see that the rock through which it was driven was of the hardest. Some two hundred feet back from the entrance the drift widened out into an irregular-shaped cavern, and the old man stopped and waved his candle to show the size of the opening.
“Right here’s where I lost the vein—pinched out on me slick and clean,” he explained. “If I hadn’t been plum’ shore she was a true fissure, I reckon I might’ve quit short off. But I kep’ on till she showed up again, away over here,” and he led Dick to a corner of the cavern where the tunnel began again, this time pitching down as well as on into the mountain.
Another two hundred feet was covered down the steepish incline before they came to the end of things, and Dick wondered how the old man ever stood it to wheelbarrow the broken-rock “spoil” up the long grade and out to the dump. But nothing is too hard for one who has been bitten by the precious-metal bug, and that the old hermit had been so bitten was shown by the eager enthusiasm with which he passed the candle flame over the face of the rock wall in which the tunnel ended, making the light follow the crooked course of a thin, dark-colored seam that extended diagonally up and down it.
“There she is,” he said excitedly. “That’s what I’ve been follerin’ for four solid years—takin’ out the winters that I’ve had to work in the smelter to get money for to buy the grub-stakes.”
Dick wasn’t particularly soft-hearted, but the thing almost moved him to tears. Here was a man, evidently nearing the end of a long life, digging and burrowing in the heart of a great mountain year after year, working tremendously, as one must to make any headway in solid rock, and with only this thin, knife-blade seam of a vein to lead him on.