“We had to cut a road across the divide. The Gulch is blocked by rails.”
“Why?”
“That is where the mine is, you know.”
“I don’t know. Whereabouts exactly is the mine?”
“It starts in the west side of the canyon, about a hundred yards from the ranch end.”
“Near a narrow cleft, topped by a sloping ledge?”
“Yes. How well you recollect every yard of the ground!”
“How did you come to locate the lost seam there?”
“By sheer chance. Some pieces of the granite wall fell away, and any miner who had been a week at his trade would have recognized the vein then.”
“When did they fall away—the bits of rock, I mean?”