HE STRUCK THE TRAIL
"Things are sort of righting themselves," he reported over a hot elk steak. "I’m getting Weimer down to work in dead earnest," chuckling. "I hold the McKenzie boys before his mind’s eye continually, and roll that car out, and dump it so quickly that he has to step lively to get enough ore picked out and blasted out to fill it."
Steele whistled when Ross told him how many cubic feet had been taken out of the Weimer-Grant tunnel during the week. He took from his pocket a paper and pencil, and fell to figuring. Ross pushed aside the empty dishes, and, leaning across the table, looked on with interest. He, too, had figured extensively since work began on Meadow Creek, but only during the last week had the figures satisfied him.
"Why, man alive!" cried Steele after a few moments’ silent work, "you’ll fetch it, at this rate." He stretched his hand across the table impetuously, and gripped Ross’s, adding, "I thought you could never do it–even with a backbone."
Ross’s shoulders straightened, and his face flushed boyishly. "We must fetch it!"
Steele leaned back, and drummed on the table. "What about the McKenzies? Of course they must know what progress you’ve made."
"Well," exclaimed Ross, "I hope I can keep ’em so interested guessing that they’ll stay all winter. They come over as socially as you please about every evening. Weimer doesn’t like it much. He has no use for ’em, but I have, you bet! I’m glad to have ’em around, especially now when I can estimate that at the present rate of speed the tunnel will be ready so we can apply for a patent by June."
To Dr. and Mrs. Grant, Ross wrote: "It’s going to be a long pull and a strong pull, but I shall stick to the ship and show father that I can do something else besides setting a bone.
"And what’s more and queerer, I’m in danger of getting interested in gold mining for itself. Every time I push our little car out to the end of the dump and unload the ore I wonder how much gold I’m watching roll away down the incline. Aunt Anne, you said in your last that it seems such a waste to throw away the ore. Well, if you were here you’d find it a greater waste of good money to try to get money out of the quartz under present conditions. You see there are only a few dollars’ worth of gold in a ton of rock. That ton would have to be ’packed,’ as they say here, eighty miles over the roughest of trails to Cody, and there loaded on cars and sent clear to Omaha, our nearest smelter. And I guess you know more than I do about the costly process of crushing ore and extracting gold from it in a smelter. It’s not like mining for ’pay dirt,’ as the men here call placer mining, where you gather up sand and wash it out yourself and find the particles of gold in the bottom of your pan. This quartz digging is the most expensive kind of mining there is. But when the Burlington gets the branch road up into Miners’ the ore can be loaded at the mines and unloaded in Omaha without change of cars. Then we’ll dig out the dumps and send them to the smelter, and back will come the gold jingling into our pockets. But whenever I’m moved to give you information I feel small, for I believe, in spite of all you write, that you both know more than I do about it now.