Little Purdick laughed and took a small shot at himself, as his habit was.
“I’m not very brave. I guess I’m rather glad those fellows have dropped us,” he said.
“Umph!” Larry grunted, stretching himself luxuriously on his blanket. “Who was it that followed the crutch cripple that night in Lost Canyon, I’d like to know? But of course that didn’t take any nerve.”
“That’s all right; sleuthing a cripple is one thing, and a stand-up fight is another,” Purdick qualified. “I guess I wouldn’t be much good in a real, for-sure scrap.”
They went on talking for a little while, Dick getting back to his cocksureness that the Golden Spider would be found, and Larry throwing cold water in bucketsful, as he usually did when the lost mine was under discussion. As once before, it was little Purdick who broke in to turn the talk current into another channel.
“Talking about minerals—and we’ve been eating and drinking and sleeping them all summer—I’d like to know what this is,” he said, taking a piece of brownish stone from his pocket. “I picked it up when we were scouting along this afternoon and dropped it into my pocket and forgot it.”
Larry and Dick both examined the specimen and could make nothing of it. “Brown stone” was the only name that fitted it, and it had no lustre, and no metallic “streak” when it was scratched. The only hint it gave of being other than it seemed to be—a bit of soft brown stone—was in its weight. Dick looked at his wrist watch.
“It’s early yet,” he said. “Get out the blowpipe and chemicals, Purdy, and we’ll run a test on it.”
Since the specimen crumbled quite easily, it was only a matter of a few minutes to grind a small part of it to powder in the porcelain mortar. To the powder was added a little borax to serve as a flux for any metal there might be in the sample, the mixture was heaped upon the cake of prepared charcoal, and the blowpipe flame was turned upon it, Dick furnishing the breath for the blast.