“You should have suspected a fault immediately.” Webster chided the younger man. “This is a volcanic country-----”
“Well,” Billy interrupted, “I suspected a fault, but not immediately. Remember I'm fifteen years your junior, professor. I remembered that frequent and violent earthquakes occur in this country, and it seemed to me a reasonable hypothesis to blame some ancient and particularly violent seismic disturbance, which had faulted the vein and set it over a considerable distance. According to my calculation, that other man should have cut the vein at eighty-three feet--yet he had gone on one hundred and two before quitting. So I got half a dozen peons and drove ahead nineteen feet on the other fellow's tunnel; and by Heck, Johnny, I cut the vein!”
“I drifted ten feet on the vein, and the ore suddenly gave out. It stopped just like that, proving I'd come to the upper end of the vein where it had faulted; so I just worked up and around, stoping and sinking a winze here and there, until just about the time my cash reserve was getting pretty low I picked up the true vein and opened it up for the full width. Come in, and I'll show you.”
They entered the tunnel, to the signal dismay of dozens of large bats. When they reached the vein, Webster broke off samples of the ore every three or four feet, crawled after Billy up through the stope and back to the true vein, from the face of which he also took numerous samples; then he crawled out into the sunshine again, hot, dirty, and perspiring.
“Billy, you'll be a real miner yet; see if you won't,” was all the praise he tendered his youthful partner, standing beside him in anticipation of a compliment, as Webster got out his portable assay outfit.
For three days Webster worked, determining the values of each sample, only to find that his assays confirmed Billy's. Then he visited the old shaft on top of the hill, assayed samples procured there, roamed the range in the immediate vicinity, marking with expert eye the timber he would find so useful and close at hand when stulls and lagging for the tunnel should be needed; then he selected a site where the waters of the stream could be impounded in a little draw far up the hillside, and returned to camp to render his final report.