“Just listen at the feather-weight, will you?” laughed Dick; adding: “But Larry’s right, Purdy; you look twice the chap you did a month ago. And it does me good to see the way you eat. The old grizzly that cleaned us out a while back had nothing on you.”
“M’m,” said Larry thoughtfully. “Speaking of grizzlies, and such things: I wonder what has become of the three hold-ups? We’ve been so busy with all the rock drilling and blasting that I’d just about forgotten them.”
“Got discouraged and dropped us, I guess,” Dick put in. “If they hadn’t, we would have heard from ’em before this time. And that brings on more talk. Have we definitely decided not to have a try at looking for old Jimmie Brock’s lost gold mine?”
Dick’s question reopened a subject which had been pretty well ignored thus far during the busy summer. Of the three, Dick was the only one who had ever taken the matter of the lost gold mine at all seriously, and at times when Larry or Purdick pinned him down, he joked about it, as they did. But now he confessed that he was just romantic enough, or foolish enough, to want to spend at least a little of the time remaining to them in a search for the Golden Spider.
His argument was fair enough. He said, and it was true, that the three rare-metal discoveries they had made amply justified them in using the remaining two weeks as they pleased; that his uncle would be more than satisfied with their summer’s work as it stood; and that that same uncle, in telling them about the Golden Spider and giving them James Brock’s pencil sketch, had fully expected that they would do as he himself had done—make a search for the lost mine.
In the end it came to a compromise, as most questions with two perfectly good and debatable sides usually do. For one of the two remaining weeks of their stay they would go on prospecting for the industrial metals, working their way back toward that part of the Little Hophras included in the penciled circle drawn by Daddy Longbeard on the worn map he had given Dick. And when they got within the circle the search for the Golden Spider should take precedence for the final week.
“Not that anything will come of it,” Larry maintained. “These mountains are full of fairy tales just like that, and you know it as well as I do, Dick. But if you want to put in a few days looking for a pot of rainbow gold, it’s all right with me.”
“And with me,” little Purdick agreed; and so it was settled.
Upon the completion of the discovery work on the vanadium claim the compromise agreed upon in this camp-fire talk was made the order of the day. For a week they combed the foot-hills and hogbacks of the western range faithfully, working slowly up to the region included in Daddy Longbeard’s magic circle, and finding nothing in the way of rare metals save in one place where, in a mass of finely brecciated granite and porphyry they discovered a lot of thin quartz veinlets carrying a little molybdenite from which the metal molybdenum, an alloy for tool steel, is extracted.
They marked this place on their map, but did not stop to locate the claim, the quantity of molybdenite in the tiny veins being so small that they decided it would not pay for the working. One day’s prospecting beyond this brought them fairly within the Daddy Longbeard circle, and, somewhat to their surprise, they found themselves camping within a short distance of the trail over which they had come from Natrolia, and no very great distance from the high-lying ravine of the ice cavern.