“There you are,” Larry summed up, when, with the addition of the iron, the blue color came back. “I guess we’re pretty safe to begin digging to-morrow morning.”
Accordingly, the first thing the next morning they got out the hammer and drills, dynamite, caps and fuse, and became stone quarriers, setting themselves the task of driving a “discovery” tunnel on the vein, because it was easier to tunnel than to sink a shaft. Being new to the quarrying trade, they made slow work of it, blistering their hands plentifully the first day or two, and learning only by laborious experience in drilling the hard rock how to place their blasts where they would do the most good.
Taking one thing with another, they spent nine of the long summer days on this job before Larry’s pocket tapeline told them they had the necessary ten feet of depth; after which it took part of another day to lay off the claim and stake it and post it with the proper notice. In honor of the leading burro, they named the lode the “Blue Fishbait.”
Shifting that afternoon to the location of the other tungsten deposit they had discovered, they went through the same process here. In this place, however, the mineral, which was wolframite or ferberite, was in a softer formation; which was lucky because it was so situated that they couldn’t uncover it by tunnelling, and had to sink a shaft ten feet down on the vein. Larry took half a day to hack out a rude windlass with the hand-axe, and again they set to work drilling and blasting.
A week sufficed for this second “discovery” development, and once more they moved on, this time to the vanadium deposit they had uncovered and located on the day of the bear’s visitation. By this time they had acquired a good bit more skill in handling the hammer and drills and dynamite, and were able to make the rock fly in fairly adequate quantities at each shot. It was Dick, the impatient one, who was continually urging speed and still more speed. This workaday rock digging, merely for the purpose of earning the right to record a claim, didn’t appeal to him, and he was eager to have it over with, and to get back to the really interesting part of the prospecting—ranging the mountains back and forth and looking for new lodes.
“Gee, fellows!” he said, as they sat around their camp-fire one night at the vanadium claim, “do you realize that this is the second week in August, and that we’ve got to be back at Old Sheddon the first week in September?”
“I’m realizing it mighty hard,” Purdick asserted. “I want what Old Sheddon is trying to give me in the way of an engineering course, but I haven’t had enough of this bully old wild life here in the mountains yet, not by a jugful.”
Larry’s broad smile was good-naturedly joshing.
“What you’ve been needing all your life was a quarryman’s job outdoors, Purdy,” he commented. “It’s sure making a man of you. You don’t look much like the little white-faced hospital rat you were when you came in with us in June.”
Purdick pulled up a shirt sleeve, made a fist and slowly curved his arm upward. “Look at that muscle!” he bragged. “Essence of striking-hammer did that. Talk about your hour a day in the gym. Make it ten hours a day with the hammer and drills in the woods and you’ll get somewhere.”