“I see,” Ned agreed. “It must have been great times out there in those early days.”
“Ha!” exclaimed Garry. “For every ounce of gold mined in the old times there was a man wasted. The early gold mining cost more in men than a war, believe me! However, that isn’t the point, or what I was telling you about.
“Some time after I left the university Uncle Terry wanted me to go off on a prospecting trip with him and I went—just for the holiday, you understand. These last few years he hasn’t made a strike. He has plenty of money, anyway; but the wanderlust of the old prospector seizes him and he just has to pack up and go.
“We struck Seeper’s Gulch. It was some strike in its day, about thirty years ago. The gold hunters dug fortunes out of that gulch, and then the Chinese came in and raked over and sifted the refuse. You’d think there wasn’t ten cents worth of valuable metal left in that place, wouldn’t you?”
Ned nodded, keenly interested in the story.
“Well, that’s what the old man thought. He made all kinds of jokes over a squatter’s family that had picketed there and were digging and toiling over the played out claims.
“It seemed that they held legal title to a big patch of the gulch. Some sharper had sawed off the claim on them for good, hard-earned money; and here they were, broke and desperate. Why! there hadn’t been any gold mined there for years and years, and their title, although perfectly legal, wasn’t worth a cent—or so it seemed.
“Uncle Terry tried to show them that. They were stubborn. They had to be, you see,” said Garry, shaking his head. “Every hope they had in the world was right in that God-forsaken gulch.
“Well,” he sighed, “I got to mooning around, impatient to be gone, and I found something. It was so plain that I wonder I didn’t fall over it and break my neck,” and Garry laughed.
“What was it? Not gold?”