."

I shall always remember Barrett's good-natured grin when the meeting
was adjourned.

"You two will have the hot end of it," he remarked. "You're going to
do the hard work, and all you've left me is a chance to do the starving
act. Right here is where I see myself giving up this palatial
apartment and going into a boarding-house. For heaven's sake, eat
light, you two. We may have to sink a hundred feet in solid rock
before we find anything."

We went in light marching order, Gifford and I; and the early dawn of
the following morning found us driving our location stakes and pacing
off the boundaries of the new claim. I like to remember that we were
neither too new to the business, nor too much excited, to be careful
and methodical. The triangular patch of unclaimed ground lay along the
slope, with the apex of the triangle pointing toward the hill-hidden
Lawrenceburg. Ignoring any vein directions which might develop later
on, we laid off our location to fit the ground, taking in all the space
we could legally hold; which would be, of course, only the triangle,
though our staking necessarily overlapped this area on all sides. If
we should be lucky enough to make a strike, ground space for our
operations was going to be at a premium, and at the very best there
wasn't an inch of room to spare.

I don't know just why we should have been afraid that anybody would
have been foolish enough to try to "jump" an unworked claim; but we
were, and we decided at once that we would not leave the ground
unwatched now that our stakes were driven and our notice duly posted.
Accordingly, Gifford went back to town to make the needful land-office
entry and to bring out the supplies, tools, and a wagon-load of lumber
for a shack, leaving me to stand guard with an old horse-pistol of
Gifford's for a weapon. It was after dark when I heard the wagon
trailing up the gulch, and I had had nothing to eat since morning. But
I was free and hopeful--and happy; with the nightmare past becoming
more and more a thing to be pushed aside and comfortably ignored.

Looking back at it now, I can see that our venture was haphazard to the
tenderfoot degree. Having built a sleeping shack out of the lumber, we
picked a place for the prospect shaft solely with reference to its
convenience on the hillside. But for this we had plenty of precedents.
What the miners of any other district would have called sheer miracles
of luck were the usual thing