“God knows. As I have said, you’ve rubbed off some of your virtues on me—suffering some little loss of them yourself, I fancy. We’ll see what they will do to me. It will be something interesting to look forward to.”
“Umph!” Philip snorted; “you’re getting grubby again—maggoty, I mean. Which proves that it’s time to hit the blankets. If you’ll look after the jacks and hobble them, I’ll gather wood for the fire.”
Bromley sat up and finished freeing his mind.
“Philip, if anybody had told me a year ago that within a short twelve-month I’d be out here in the Colorado mountains, picking, shovelling, driving jack-asses, cooking at least half of my own meals, and liking it all ... well, ‘liar’ would have been the mildest epithet I should have chucked at him. Comical, isn’t it?” And with that he went to valet the burros.
The first day after their arrival in the western valley was spent in exploring, and they finally settled upon a gulch not far from their camp of the night before as the most promising place in which to dig. Though they had as yet mastered only the bare rudiments of a trained prospector’s education, the two summer months had given them a modicum of experience; enough to enable them to know roughly what to look for, and how to recognize it when they found it.
The gulch in which they began operations was a miniature canyon, and the favored site was indicated by the half-hidden outcropping of a vein of brownish material which they could trace for some distance up the steep slope of the canyon wall. During the day’s explorations they had frequently tested the sands of the stream bed for gold “colors,” washing the sand miner-fashion in their frying pan, and it was upon the hint given by the “colors” that they had pitched upon the gulch location. Below the gulch mouth microscopic flakes of gold appeared now and again in the washings. But the sands above were barren.
“It looks as if we may have found something worth while, this time,” Philip hazarded, after they had cleared the rock face to reveal the extent of the vein. “The ‘colors’ we’ve been finding in the creek sand come from a lode somewhere, and this may be the mother vein. We’ll put the drills and powder to it to-morrow and see what happens.”
Accordingly, for a toilsome fortnight they drilled and blasted in the gulch, and by the end of that time the prospect had developed into a well-defined vein of quartz wide enough to admit the opening of a working tunnel. Having no equipment for making field tests, they could only guess at the value of their discovery, but the indications were favorable. The magnifying glass showed flecks and dustings of yellow metal in selected specimens of the quartz; and, in addition, the ore body was of the character they had learned to distinguish as “free milling”—vein-matter from which the gold can be extracted by the simplest and cheapest of the crushing processes.
Taking it all in all, they had good reason to be hopeful; and on the final day of the two weeks of drilling and blasting they skipped the noonday meal to save time and were thus enabled to fire the evening round of shots in the shallow tunnel just before sunset. A hasty examination of the spoil blown out removed all doubt as to the character of the material in which they were driving. The vein was gold-bearing quartz, beyond question; how rich, they had no means of determining; but there were tiny pockets—lenses—in which the free metal was plainly visible without the aid of the magnifier.
That night, before their camp fire, they held a council of war. Though it seemed more than likely that the lode was a rich one, they were now brought face to face with the disheartening fact that the mere ownership of a potential gold mine is only the first step in a long and uphill road to fortune. In the mining regions it is a common saying that the owner of a silver prospect needs a gold mine at his back to enable him to develop it, and the converse is equally true.