Having done this, we poked up a lot of the ground ice, which we collected and put into a tin bucket, and taking this home we melted the ice, poured off the water, and made a little parcel of the sand that remained.
A few days later we had finished our ice-cutting and had stowed away the crop in the ice-house, when we were at length free to go off and make the little prospecting expedition that Tom had asked us to undertake.
First walking up the bed of the cañon, where the water was now represented by sheets of crackling white ice, we arrived presently at the first branch creek which came in on the right. This we ascended in turn, going some distance up it before we found a likely patch of sand, into which we chopped a hole with the old hatchet we had brought for the purpose, disclosing a little of the black material at the bottom; though the amount was so scanty that we could not be sure it was really the black sand we were seeking.
Going on up this branch creek, much impeded by the snow which became deeper and deeper the higher we ascended, we were nearing one of the bends when Joe, who was in advance, suddenly stopped, exclaiming:
“Look there, Phil! Tracks coming down the bank. Somebody is ahead of us.”
“So there is,” said I. “What can he be doing, I wonder?”
Following these tracks a short distance, we very soon discovered the reason for their being there. The man was on the same quest as ourselves!
In a bend of the stream where the snow lay two feet thick, he had dug a hole down to the sand, and then through the sand itself to bed-rock. At the bottom of the hole was a little black sand, showing the marks of a hatchet or knife-blade where it had been gouged out, but all around the hole, between the bed-rock and the yellow sand above, was a black line an inch thick, composed of the shiny, powdered galena ore. There could be no doubt that the man ahead of us was hunting the same game as we were.
“Do you suppose it’s Yetmore, Joe?” said I.
“No,” Joe answered, emphatically, “I’m sure it isn’t. Look at his tracks: they are bigger than mine.”