After all, the vein or deposit was not so hard to locate, now that they knew where to look for it. Of course, they had no means of ascertaining the extent of the deposit or its commercial value, if it had any, in a place so remote from civilization. None the less, they staked it off accurately, located it as well as they could on the Geodetic Survey map upon which they were carefully tracing their wandering course from day to day, and posted the notice, protecting it as well as they could by digging a niche in the shaley cliff and pegging the notice at the back of it where it would be at least a little sheltered from the weather.
All this business of stepping off and measuring, and finding landmarks, and making a sketch of the mesa and creek bottom, and searching carefully over the surrounding area for other possible deposits of the mineral, took most of the afternoon. And after all was done, Larry was pessimistic enough to say that it was probably a day wasted.
“I did a good bit of reading-up on these rare metals last week while we were waiting for Mr. Starbuck,” he said, “and from what I could learn, the reduction processes—getting the metal out of the ore—is the long end of the pole with all of them; vanadium and all the rest. So, unless your mine is big enough to warrant the building of a reduction plant on the spot—and not many of them are—you’re up against the proposition of transporting a ton of the stuff to some chemical works, and out of the ton they’ll get maybe a pound or so of the metal.”
“Well,” said Dick, “what of that?”
“Use your old bean,” Larry invited. “Suppose your vanadium is worth five dollars and a half a pound—which is the highest price I found quoted. We’re at least forty miles from the nearest railroad, which means forty miles of jack-freighting for the ore. How far would five dollars and a half, or twice or three times that much, go toward paying the cost of jack-freighting a ton of stuff over forty miles of no-trail-at-all?”
“Oh, gosh!” said Dick. “When it comes to throwing cold water, you can beat a hydraulic mining outfit! Let’s go back to camp and cook us a real supper. I’m hungry enough to eat a piece of boiled dog. We can come back to-morrow with the tools and dig the ten-foot deep ‘discovery’ hole that we’ll have to make before we can record the claim.”
The return mile-and-considerable-more seemed even longer now than it had in the morning. In the search for the vanadium deposit they had done a good deal of scrambling and climbing, and the mild excitement of the search had kept them from realizing how much ground they were covering.
“I’ll bet you couldn’t wake me with a dynamite blast after I turn in to-night,” Dick was saying as they approached the entrance to the pocket gulch, “and I wouldn’t lug this pick another mile if it was the only one in the world. But see here! What’s been happening?”
They had reached the pine-tree which had been felled to block the entrance to the pocket gulch, and it looked as if somebody had driven an army truck over it. Its branches were broken down and twisted off, and the trunk itself was scarred and barked as if the suppositious truck wheels had been shod with spurs.
Thoroughly alarmed at the evidence of so much violence, they forgot their weariness and hurried on into the gulch. What they found when they reached the camp site was as appalling as it was bewildering. The packs had been dragged from the top of the big flat rock where they had left them in the morning and were literally torn to pieces, with their contents scattered all over the place; that is, what wasn’t gone was scattered.