“All right; I’m headed that way, too, and, as you see, I have one more horse than I can ride. I’ll give you a lift, if you say so.”
The big man’s laugh was like the rumbling of distant thunder.
“If I say so? Say, young feller me lad, I ain’t got but one mouth, but I reckon if I had a dozen of ’em they’d all be sayin’ so at once,” he affirmed gratefully. “Want to pitch out right now?”
“No; I’ll eat first. Didn’t want to stop until I got to the top of the pass.”
Philip unslung his provision haversack and spread the contents on the flat rock. Over the meal, which he invited the wayfarer to share with him, he got the story of the bearded man’s summer; weary months of prospecting in the western slope wilderness with nothing to show for it, not even the specimens from the few putative discoveries he had made, since these had gone to the bottom of the Roaring Fork with the drowned burro.
“Hard luck,” Philip commented, when the brief tale of discouragement had been told. “What will you do now?”
“Same as every busted prospector does: hunt me a winter job in a smelter ’r stamp-mill and sweat at it till I get enough spondulix ahead to buy me another grub-stake.”
“Go to work as a day-laborer?”
“You’ve named it. Minin’s the only trade I know; and the mills ain’t payin’ miner’s wages for shovelin’ ore into the stamps.”
“Why don’t you try for a job in one of the big mines?”