This seemed to be all Joe wanted, for he at once picked up his tools again, and with the same caution made his way back to the first hole.
“What’s your pile of stones for, Joe?”I asked.
“Why, I found the vein again, hanging-wall and all, and I set up that little monument so as to get the line of the vein from here.”
Taking out of his pocket a little compass we had brought for the purpose, he laid it on the rock, and sighting back over his “monument,” he found that the vein ran northeast and southwest.
“Phil,”said he, “do you see that dead pine, broken off at the top, with a hawk’s nest in it, away back there on the upper side of the gulch where we left the ponies?”
“Yes,”I replied, “I see it. What of it?”
“The line of the vein runs right to that tree, and I propose we get back and hunt for it there. I don’t want to set up the location-stake here: this place is too difficult to get at and too dangerous to work in. So I vote we get back to the dead tree and try again there. What do you say?”
“All right,”I replied. “We’ll do so.”
“Very well, then I’ll come up now.”
But this was more easily said than done. Do what he would, Joe could not get up to where I sat, holding out to him first a hand and then a foot. He tried walking and he tried crawling, but in vain; the rock beneath the shale was too steep and too smooth and too slippery. At length, at my suggestion, Joe threw the shovel up to me, when, on my lying flat and reaching downward as far as I could stretch, he succeeded in hooking the pick over the shoulder of the shovel-blade, after which he had no more difficulty.