"Mighty clear of anybody taking your claim," said another. "You can go there and work it, for all of us; but we don't want you snooping around us like you did last summer."
"What is the matter with those fellows?" asked Claus, when they were out of hearing. "What did you men do here last summer?"
"Just nothing at all," replied Jake. "We wanted to know how much gold everybody was digging, and that made them jealous of us."
"But if you can't mingle with them as you did then, how are you going to find out about the haunted mine?"
"Oh, we'll mix with them just as we did last year, only we sha'n't have so much to say to them," said Jake. "Here is our claim, and it don't look as though anybody had been nigh it."
Claus was both surprised and downhearted. If he had known that the miners were going to extend such a reception as that to him he would have been the last one to go among them. There he was, almost alone, with two hundred brawny fellows around him, each one with a revolver strapped to his waist, and their looks and actions indicated that if necessity required it they would not be at all reluctant to use them. He managed to gather up courage to visit the general camp-fire, which was kindled just at dark, where the miners met to smoke their pipes and tell about what had happened in their mines during the day. This one had not made anything. The dirt promised fairly, and he hoped in a few days to strike a vein that would pay him and his partner something. Another had tapped a little vein, and he believed that by the time he got a rock out of his way he would stumble onto a deposit that would make him so rich that he would start for the States in short order.
"Well, partner, how do you come on?" asked the man who was sitting close to Claus, who was listening with all his ears. "Does your dirt pan out any better than it did last summer?"
"We have not seen the color of anything yet," replied Claus. "I do not believe there is any gold there."
"You are a tenderfoot, ain't you?"
"Yes; I never have been in the mines before."