have all the
luck. I'll make a stab where I am.'

"Well, sir, it sounds queer to tell it, and it seems queerer still
to think of the doing of it, but I hadn't dug two feet before I
come to bed rock, and there was some heavy black chunks.

"'Aggy,' says I, 'what's these things?' throwing one over to him.
He caught it and Stared at it.

"'Where did you get that?' says he, in almost a whisper.

"'Why, out of the hole, of course!' says I, laughing. 'Come take a
look!'

"Aggy wasn't the kind of man to go off the handle over trifles, but
when he looked into that hole he turned perfectly green. His knees
give out from under him and he sat on the ground like a man in a
trance, wiping the sweat off his face with a motion like a machine.

"'What the devil ails you?' says I astonished. I thought maybe I'd
done something I hadn't ought to do, through ignorance of the rules
and regulations of mining.

"'Red,' says he dead solemn, 'I've mined for twenty year, and from
Old Mexico to Alaska, but I never saw anything that was ace-high to
that before. Gold laying loose in chunks on top of the bed-rock is
too much for me--I wish Hy could see this.'

"'Gold!' says I. 'What you talking about? What have those black
hunks to do with gold?'

"The only answer he made was to lay the one I had thrown to him on
top of a rock and hit her a crack with a pick. Then he handed it
to me. Sure enough! There under the black was the yeller. Of
course, it I'd known more about the business I could have told it
by the weight, but I'd never seen a piece of gold fresh off the
farm before in my life. I hadn't the slightest idea what it looked
like, and I learned afterward it all looks different. Some of it
shines up yaller in the start; some of it's red, and some is like
ours, coated black with iron-crust.

"So I looked at Ag, and Ag looked at me, neither one of us
believing anything at all for awhile. I simply couldn't get hold
of the thing--I ain't yet, for that matter. I expect to wake up
and find it a pipe dream, and in some ways I wouldn't mind if it
was. I never was so completely two men as I was on that occasion.
One of 'em was hopping around and hollering with Ag, yelling
'hooray!' and the other didn't take much interest in the
proceedings at all. And it wasn't until I thought, 'Now I can pay
that cussed cayote of a stage driver what I owe him!' that I got
any good out of it. That brought it home to me. When I spoke to