"The boat is taken out of Yuma in sections and then put together in a place whar nobody ain't likely to come nosin' around. Then they starts out on what I guess was the most darn-fool enterprise any two locoed fortune-hunters ever undertook. How it ended you know. They both got fever, but Sanchez was the worst. He died that same evening, his tumble in the water havin' made him worse. I buried him there as best I could and then, as he had wished, I takes the sample and the map.
"'Some day,' he told me, just afore he closed his eyes for good, 'you'll be glad you saved me, even though it was too late.'
"Well, I beat it back and get out of the canyon more dead than alive and finally make a small strike. I go to San Francisco with it and try to git ther stuff analyzed, but everyone I tole about it laughed at me and said I was crazy. So, thinks I, I'll come East. My money was about all gone, so I shipped afore ther mast on a Cape Horn ship, and got here.
"Now, you have me tale, old top," grinned the good-natured miner, and added: "Well, has my toe-and-heeling been worth its salt?"
The professor nodded solemnly.
"What is it?" cried Jack, his heart beating with a strange, wild hope.
Tom and Zeb echoed Jack's eager question.
"My friends," declared the little man of science pompously, "we have reason to believe that a wonderful discovery has been made, namely, Z.2.X."