“Keep clear of drugs and whisky. It’s good advice,” he said. “You may go a long way before you die.”
“I’d feel a little more sure of it if we could find the mine. It would give you a lift up, too.”
Grenfell shook his head.
“It could never lift me back to where I was,” he said. “Could it give me the steady nerves and the brain I used to have? There was a time when scarcely a big mine was started in the west before they sent their specimens to me. What could success offer me now besides a few more years of indulgence and an opportunity for drinking myself into my grave in comfort and with comparative decency?”
Weston supposed that this was the effect of weariness; but his comrade straightened himself a little, and his uncertain gaze grew steadier.
“There’s one thing it can do,” he went on. “It can show those who remember him as he was that Grenfell the assayer and mineralogist can still look round a mineral basin and tell just where the gold should be.”
Weston was no geologist, but he had seen enough of it to recognize that prospecting is an art. Men certainly strike a vein or alluvial placer by the merest chance now and then, but the trained man works from indication to indication until, though he is sometimes mistaken, he feels reasonably sure as to what waits to be uncovered by the blasting charge or shovel. Grenfell’s previous account of the discovery had, however, not made quite plain the fact that he had adopted the latter course.
“You told me you found the quartz by accident when you went to drink at a creek,” he said. “Any green hand might have done the same.”
Grenfell laughed.
“The point is that I knew there was gold in the valley. I told you we stayed there until the provisions had almost run out. I wanted material proof—and I was satisfied when I found that little strip of outcrop.”