The law requires only the driving of
corner stakes and the posting of a notice prior to the preliminary
entry; and as soon as a man got his stakes driven and his notice
displayed, he became a vanishing point on the horizon, joining a mad
race for town and the land office.

The assault upon the harmless mountain-side did not last as long as we
both feared it might, and there was no occasion for gun-play. Gifford
and I patrolled the boundaries of our claim and made due protest when
it became evident that anybody was overlapping us. Before the sun was
an hour high the last of the locators had tailed off in the town
foot-race; and though there were more coming, the most of these
laggards turned back at once at sight of the forest of new stakes.

It was not until after our guard duties had ceased to press upon us
that we remembered the wagon-load of precious stuff left at the mercy
of a robber world on the bare hillside two miles away. Gifford ran to
the shoulder of the over-looking spur with Barrett's field-glass, and I
could tell by his actions that the strain was off.

"Dixon is back with another wagon, and he and a helper are transferring
the ore sacks," he reported when he came in. "I told him when he left
that he might get help wherever he could; that it was no use trying to
keep it dark any longer."

There being nothing to prevent it now, we cooked breakfast on the camp
stove, sitting afterward to eat it on the shack door-step, with the
weapons handy. I think Gifford had quite forgotten that he had raided
the shack chuck-box at daybreak. Anyway, his appetite appeared
undiminished. He seemed to think that the worst of our troubles were
over, and I did not undeceive him. The later stragglers were still
tramping over the ground and reading the lately posted notices. A few
of them came up to ask questions, and one, a grizzled old fellow who
might have posed as "One-eyed Ike" in Western melodramas, stopped to
talk a while.

"You boys shore have struck it big," he commented. "How come?"

We explained briefly the finding of the unoccupied ground and the
taking of the average Cripple Creek prospector's chance, and he nodded
sagely.

"Jest lit down 'twixt two days and dug a hole and struck hit right
there at grass-roots, did ye? That's tenderfoots' luck, ever' time.
Vein runnin' bigger?"

Gifford admitted that it was, and the one-eyed man begged a bit of
tobacco for the filling of his blackened corn-cob pi