“We’re always looking toward El Dorado, we miners,” he said with a laugh. “It’s hope that keeps us up.”
“‘El Dorado’—the hoped-for land,” repeated Betty softly. And then, standing there in the flickering radiance of the torch, she repeated, while the men were silent, that concluding paragraph of Robert Louis Stevenson’s essay:
“‘O toiling hands of mortals! O unwearied feet, traveling ye know not whither! Soon, soon it seems to you, you must come forth on some conspicuous hilltop and, but a little way further, against the setting sun, descry the spires of El Dorado. Little do ye know your own blessedness, for to travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive, and the true success is to labor.’”
“Amen,” Hunt commented seriously.
“You said it,” agreed the mining man with that bluff emphasis that did not shock Betty so much now as it might at the beginning. “That’s what keeps me going. Stevenson knew what he was writing about. But, we would have considered him a weakling out here, I am afraid. We are inclined to judge everything here in terms of muscle and brawn.”
“But it has been your brains, Joe, not your brawn, that has carried you so far in this work,” Hunt declared warmly.
Hurley sighed as they went back to the shaft. “Let me tell you I have had to use considerable brawn, Willie, in handling these roughnecks that work for me.”
He laughed again. Joe Hurley could not be sober for long. And his temper exploded when he had to shout at the top of his lungs to attract the attention of the watchmen when they wanted to get up to the surface.
“This feller isn’t worth the powder to blow him from here to Jericho,” grumbled Hurley. “I always miss old Steve Siebert when he slopes for the desert, as he’s bound to do every spring. That old desert rat is always here over Sunday to see that everything is all right, when he’s on the job. But he just has to go off prospecting once in so often.”