“‘No,’ says I, ’don’t touch it—­it might be catching.  Now, you whelp!’ says I to the driver, ’you tell us if there’s a place where we can get anything to eat around here?’ We’d expected to go hungry until we hit the camp some forty mile further on, where we knew there’d be plenty for anybody that wanted it.

“‘Yes,’ says he; ’there’s a man running a shack two mile up the river.’

“‘All right,’ says I.  ’Drive on.  You’ve played us as dirty a trick as one man can play another.  If we ever get a cinch on you, you can expect we’ll pull her till the latigoes snap.’

“He kept shut till he got across the river, where he felt safe.

“‘It’s all right about that cinch!’ he hollers back, grinning.  ’Only wait till you get it, yer suckers!  Sponges!  Beats!  Dead-heads!  Yah!’

“Well, a man can’t catch a team of horses, and that’s all there is about it, but I want to tell you he was on the anxious seat for a quarter of a mile.  We tried hard.

“When we got back to where we started and could breathe again, we held a council of war.

“‘Now Aggy,’ says I, ‘we’re dumped—­what shall we do?’

He sat there awhile looking around him, snapping pebbles with his thumb.

“‘Tell you what it is, Red,’ he says at last, ’we might as well go mining right here.  This is likely gravel, and there’s a river.  If that bar in front of you had been further in the mountains, it would have been punched full of holes.  It’s only because it’s on the road that nobody’s taken the trouble to see what was in it.  This road was made by cattle ranchers, that didn’t know nothing about mining, and every miner that’s gone over the trail had his mouth set to get further along as quick as possible—­just like us.  Do you see that little hollow running down to the river?  Well you try your luck there.  I give you that place as it’s the most probable, and you as a tenderfoot in the business will 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.’