They clambered up the dump to a point where two v light steel rails projected over the edge. On top of the dump, lying beside the rails, were two small, rusty, steel ore cars; the rails led from the edge of the dump to the mouth of a tunnel in the hillside and disappeared therein.
Webster stood a moment, looking round him. “How did you happen to locate this ledge?” he demanded. “Was it grass-root stuff, with an out-cropping here at the foot of the hill? No, of course it wasn't. You haven't enough ore on the dump. What the devil were you driving at?”
“Only a small portion of that dump is mine, Jack, and I didn't locate the ground originally. I came into this valley from the south, and as I worked up the range, I found a bald spot close to the top of the hill, and a gallows-frame over an abandoned shaft. Naturally, I went down the shaft to see why it had been abandoned. To my surprise, I found a twelve-foot vein of free-milling ore, on a contact between andesite and Silurian limestone. The ledge stood straight up and down, which seemed to argue great depth.”
“Somebody had found an outcropping on top of that hill,” Webster declared with conviction, “and sunk a shaft on the vein to open it up and determine its width and direction. How deep was this old shaft? Thirty or forty feet?”
“Thirty-two feet. I figured it out just that way, too. After determining approximately which way the ledge was pitching, I made up my mind I'd have a tunnel driven to cut the ledge at right angles at the foot of the hill, since no practical man would mine from the top of a hill and hoist his ore through a shaft, when he could mine from the bottom and haul his ore out on cars through a tunnel. So I came prowling down into the valley and found this tunnel. The work had been abandoned for a couple of years, and after examining the tunnel I thought I knew why. They had failed to cut the ledge as they expected.”
“Hum-m! And what did you do, Bill?”
“I got my transit and ran a line from the shaft on the hill, following the direction in which the ledge was running, and marked out the exact point toward the base of the hill where I would start my tunnel to cut the ledge. To my surprise, I discovered my predecessor had selected that identical spot. So I verified my calculations and then sat down to think it over.”
“You should have suspected a fault immediately.” Webster chided the younger man. “This is a volcanic country——-”
“Well,” Billy interrupted, “I suspected a fault, but not immediately. Remember I'm fifteen years your junior, professor. I remembered that frequent and violent earthquakes occur in this country, and it seemed to me a reasonable hypothesis to blame some ancient and particularly violent seismic disturbance, which had faulted the vein and set it over a considerable distance. According to my calculation, that other man should have cut the vein at eighty-three feet—yet he had gone on one hundred and two before quitting. So I got half a dozen peons and drove ahead nineteen feet on the other fellow's tunnel; and by Heck, Johnny, I cut the vein!”
“Bully boy! And then?”