to
look for us; and there'd have been precious little fun in that. Did it
scare you when I went scooting down the slide on my back?"

"It certainly did," I replied. "I expected to have to go down to Peter's
house and lug _you_ home next--if there was any of you left."

"Well, to tell you the truth, I was a bit scared myself. It was a great
piece of luck my falling into that hole. It's a dangerous place, this,
and the sooner we get out of it the better; so, let us start back, at
once."

Making our way up the spur, we again skirted along between the upper
edge of the slide and the foot of the cliff, and ascending once more to
the ridge, we retraced our steps down it until we presently arrived at
the dead tree with the hawk's nest in it.

Here, after a careful inspection of the ground, we went to work, Joe
with the pick, and I, following behind him, throwing out the loose stuff
with the shovel and searching through each shovelful for bits of galena.
In this way we worked, cutting a narrow trench across the line where we
supposed the vein ought to run, until presently Joe himself gave a
great shout which brought me to his side in an instant.

With the point of his pick he had hooked out a lump of galena as big as
his head!

My! How excited we were! And how we did work! We just flew at it, tooth
and nail--or, rather, pick and shovel. If our lives had depended on it
we could not have worked any harder, I firmly believe. The consequence
was that at the end of an hour we had uncovered a vein fifteen feet
wide, disclosing a porphyry wall on one side and a limestone wall on the
other.

The vein was not, of course, a solid body of ore. Very far from it.
Though there were bits of galena scattered pretty thickly all across it,
the bulk of the vein-matter was composed of scraps of quartz mixed with
yellow earth--the latter, as we afterwards learned, being itself
decomposed lead-ore--to say nothing of grass-roots, tree-roots and other
rubbish which helped to make up the mass.

But that we had found a real, genuine vein, even we, novices as we were
at the business, could not doubt, and very heartily we shook hands with
each other when our trenching at length brought us up against the
limestone foot-wall. With the discovery of this foot-wall, Joe called a
halt.

"Enough!" he cried. "Enough, Phil! Let's stop now. We've got the vein,
all right, and a staving good vein it is, and all we have to do for the
present is to set up o