That was a slow-match that stuck out of the hole he had drilled in the rock, and it led down to the charge of powder he had skillfully rammed in at the bottom.
"We can hardly afford to waste so much powder," the Captain had muttered, "but it won't do for me to cross 'em too much on such a thing."
Back they went for a hundred yards, while the fuse burned its slow, sputtering way down through the "tamping" Bill had rammed around it.
They had not long to wait. The blazing fires lit up the whole ledge and the bordering cliffs, and the miners could see distinctly everything that happened on it. Suddenly there came a puff of smoke from the drill hole. Then the rock outside of it, toward the chasm, rose a little, and a great fragment of it tumbled over down the ledge, while a dull, thunderous burst of sound startled the silence of the night, and awaked all the echoes of the cliffs and the cañon. No such sound had ever before been heard there, by night or by day, since the world was made; but Captain Skinner and his miners were not thinking of things like that.
"That'll do, boys," he said. "There'll be powder marks on that rock for twenty years. Our claim's good now, if any of us ever come back to make it."
The men thought of how rich a mine it was, and each one promised himself that he would come back, whether the rest did or not.
It is not easy to tire out fellows as tough as they were; but Captain Skinner was a "fair boss," as they all knew, and the men who stood sentinel around his camp that night were not the men who had toiled so hard on the mine.
"He doesn't seem to need any sleep himself," remarked one of them to Bill, as they were routed out of their blankets an hour before daylight the next morning.
"You'll have to eat your breakfast on horseback, you three," he said to them. "Strike right for the gap, and if you come across anything that doesn't look right, you can send one of you back to let me know. Sharp, now! We won't be long in following."
Their horses were quickly saddled, and away they rode, each man doing his best, as he went, with a huge piece of cold roast venison. The Captain had remarked to them: "That'll do ye. Your coffee'll be just as hot as ours."