Larry looked up from his stake trimming. What Dick said was quite true. With a tree felled across the gulch entrance for a barrier, the burros wouldn’t stray, though of that there was little danger anyway, so long as there were grass and water in the pocket. As to the safety of the camp dunnage there was even less question. With the exception of a few abandoned prospect holes, the inter-mountain wilderness in which they had been tramping and camping for three weeks had yielded no signs of human occupancy, past or present. Still, Larry hesitated. The first of the unwritten laws of the camper in any region is never to separate himself very far from his supplies and his means of transportation.
“I don’t know about that, Dick. Maybe I’m a lot too cautious, but——”
“Pshaw!” Dick broke in, “everything will be as safe as a clock! We haven’t seen a sign of a human being for three weeks, and I’ll bet there isn’t one within forty miles of us this very minute. If we fix it so the jacks can’t stray off, there isn’t a thing that can happen. Besides, we may want to stay down there at that place of Purdy’s projecting around for a good part of the day, and if we do, we’ll have our camp ready to come back to without having to make it again.”
Larry laughed.
“You’re just too lazy to draw your breath, Dickie; that’s all that is the matter with you,” he said; but he didn’t offer any more objections to Dick’s plan, and after breakfast the tree was cut down to block the gulch entrance, and the three of them started back for the vanadium prospect, leaving the camp just as it was, save that they were woodsmen enough to put out the camp-fire, and thoughtful enough to wrap up the rifles and the dunnage and put the packs oh top of a flat boulder where the jacks wouldn’t trample on them in their grazing ramblings. For the day’s work they carried only a pick, a shovel, the geologist’s hammer and the short-handled axe.
Notwithstanding Purdick’s confident assertion, it proved to be a good bit more than a mile back to the mesa foot where he had picked up the bit of vanadinite. Worse than that, after they reached the approximate place he found that he couldn’t identify the spot where he had found the specimen. It was a limestone outcrop, and there was a stretch of a quarter of a mile or so along the creek edge where one place looked very much like another.
So, when the time came for them to sit down and eat the noon snack they had brought with them, they were still looking for the deposit of which the specimen was a fragment and were beginning to wonder why it was so hard to find.
“You’re a hoodoo, Purdy,” said Dick, joshing the town-bred one. “Are you right sure it was yesterday, and not the day before, when you picked up that piece of stuff?”
“Of course I am!” was the indignant reply. “And it was right along here, too. If I’d had any idea it was ore——” He stopped short and made a dive for something lying at his feet. “There!” he broke out triumphantly, “here’s another piece of it, right now!”
There was no mistaking the fact. There are few crystals in the world more beautiful than those of the lead vanadates, and once seen, they are not easily forgotten. The newly found fragment was evidently a chip off the same block, as Dick put it, and, hurriedly finishing the snack, they renewed their search for the “mother vein.”