The milking was done, and they all went back to breakfast, where they were met by Mrs. Brunt, whose round face was all aglow from the labors of cooking. Then they went down to the strip of meadow again and made an onslaught on the hay-field, in which Tom, who tackled that part not yet mowed, cut such a swath as made old Sol stare. They finished early in the day, and as they turned back to the store the owner surveyed the stack he and Phil had built with the greatest satisfaction imaginable, remarking that the two had accomplished in less than a day what would have taken him the best part of a week.
Phil had indeed worked hard during the day; he had thought hard also. Ideas had been chasing through his head in numbers. How rich in gold was the deposit? How could he test it? How could it be separated in bulk at a cost low enough to pay? Ah, that was the vital question of the whole matter! And yet if that were solved other questions would follow. How to promote or float the scheme? Whom to apply to? How to proportion the profits? Yes, Phil had been thinking very hard, indeed, and thinking to such purpose as to be fully prepared to talk to the point. The subject of the pay bottom was not referred to again during the day; but when they had taken their places in the doorway, as on the previous evening, while the merry rattle of the plates and the “clink” of the knives and forks and spoons betokened dish washing in the kitchen, Phil began to speak his little piece.
“I want to talk to you seriously, Mr. Brunt, about a matter that I have had in mind since yesterday. As we came down from the Notch I noticed the muddy bed of the stream, and remarked to Tom here, that I believed if that sediment could be coraled there would be money in it. I found this morning that another great mind—and Phil laughed at his own conceit—had run in the same channel, and had built twenty-five years ago what I had proposed yesterday as a good thing.
“Now, Mr. Brunt, if I can show you that your idle pond is exceedingly valuable in gold, I want to know if you will share equally with me any profits that I may show you the way to get out of it?”
Sol chuckled good-naturedly, but incredulously, and said:
“Aye, aye, my boy! You can have half the profits and more too.”
“It is agreed seriously?” persisted Phil.
“All right, my boy—only understand I put up no money.”
“That leads me right to the next point. Providing, as before, I could prove value here, a third man or syndicate, or something meaning capital, would have to be brought in. Speaking in a general way, will you agree to give the use of this bottom and your adjoining land on a basis of, say, one-third of the profits to each of the three concerned—you, for your mine; myself, for the process I know I can invent, and the third man for his money to float the enterprise.”
Phil was conscious all the while that he was furnishing Mr. Brunt with more amusement than matter for earnest thought, but having obtained a really serious promise of the donation of land on the basis referred to—always providing of course, it could be proved by actual test that the gold could be separated at a profit—Phil took Sol inside, where in the lamplight he told all his ideas and schemes, his theory of the separating process and a score of other points, while Tom could only stare open mouthed and wonder where his chum had learned all this about stock companies and spiral wheels and hydraulics.