nt Prodigies," Miss Rosie and Miss Vi, who now weighed close to
two hundred pounds, tempting an ungallant freighter to observe that they
must be "throw-backs" to Percheron stock and adding that "they ought to
work great on the wheel." Their hips stood out like well-filled saddle
pockets and they still wore their hair down their backs in thin braids,
but, as the only girls within fifty miles, the "Prodigies" were
undisputed belles.

One dull day in early December, when the sky had not lightened even at
noon, a monotonous day in the Hinds House, since there had been no
impromptu concert and the cards had been running with unsensational
evenness, while every thread-bare topic seemed completely talked out,
Uncle Bill walked restlessly to the window and by the waning light
turned a bit of "rock" over in his hand.

The sight was too much for Yankee Sam, who hastily joined him.

"Think you got anything, Bill?"

"I got a hell-uv-a-lot of somethin' or a hell-uv-a-lot of nothin'. It's
forty feet across the face."

"Shoo!" Sam took it from him and picked at it with a knife-point,
screwing a glass into his eye to inspect the particle which he laid out
carefully in his palm.

"Looks like somethin' good."

"When I run a fifty foot tunnel into a ledge of antimony over on the
Skookumchuck it _looked_ like somethin' good." Uncle Bill added drily:
"I ain't excited."

"It might be one of them rar' minerals." Yankee Sam hefted it
judicially. "What do you hold it at?"

"Anything I can git."

"You ought to git ten thousand dollars easy when Capital takes holt."

"I'd take a hundred and think I'd stuck the feller, if I could git
cash."

"A hundred!" Yankee Sam flared up in instant wrath. "It's cheap fellers
like you that's killin' this camp!"

"Mortification had set in on this camp 'fore I ever saw it, Samuel,"
replied Uncle Bill calmly. "I was over in the Buffalo Hump Country doin'
assessment work fifteen hundred feet above timber-line when the last
Live One pulled out of Ore City. They ain't been one in since to my
knowledge. The town's so quiet you can hear the fish come up to breathe
in Lemon Crick and I ain't lookin' for a change soon."

"You wait till spring."

"I wore out the bosoms of two pair of Levi Strauss's every winter since
1910 waitin' for spring, and I ain't seen nothin' yet except Capital
makin' wide circles around Ore City. This here camp's got a black eye."

"And who give it a black eye?" demanded Yanke