ps, helping
himself with the pick in one hand and the shovel in the other, until,
about a hundred yards distant, he arrived at another hole where a tree
had been rooted out, and here he went to work again. This time he kept
at it for a good half hour, but at length he laid down his tools, and
for a few minutes occupied himself by building with loose pieces of rock
a little pillar about eighteen inches high.

"Can you see that, Phil?" he shouted.

"Yes, I can see it," I called back.

This seemed to be all Joe wanted, for he at once picked up his tools
again, and with the same caution made his way back to the first hole.

"What's your pile of stones for, Joe?" I asked.

"Why, I found the vein again, hanging-wall and all, and I set up that
little monument so as to get the line of the vein from here."

Taking out of his pocket a little compass we had brought for the
purpose, he laid it on the rock, and sighting back over his "monument,"
he found that the vein ran northeast and southwest.

"Phil," said he, "do you see that dead pine, broken off at the top, with
a hawk's nest in it, away back there on the upper side of the gulch
where we left the ponies?"

"Yes," I replied, "I see it. What of it?"

"The line of the vein runs right to that tree, and I propose we get
back and hunt for it there. I don't want to set up the location-stake
here: this place is too difficult to get at and too dangerous to work
in. So I vote we get back to the dead tree and try again there. What do
you say?"

"All right," I replied. "We'll do so."

"Very well, then I'll come up now."

But this was more easily said than done. Do what he would, Joe could not
get up to where I sat, holding out to him first a hand and then a foot.
He tried walking and he tried crawling, but in vain; the rock beneath
the shale was too steep and too smooth and too slippery. At length, at
my suggestion, Joe threw the shovel up to me, when, on my lying flat and
reaching downward as far as I could stretch, he succeeded in hooking the
pick over the shoulder of the shovel-blade, after which he had no more
difficulty.

"Well, Joe," said I, when we had safely reached the rocks again, "it's
just as well we didn't both go down together after all, isn't it?"

"That's what it is," replied my partner, heartily. "If you had tried to
come down with me we should both probably have tumbled into that hole
together, and there we should have had to stay till somebody came up