But then occurred a singular coincidence.  The new water-bringer was as scandalously late in his delivery of the precious fluid as his predecessor!  An hour passed and he did not return.  His unfortunate partners, toiling away with pick and crowbar on the burning ledge, were clamorous from thirst, and Bray was becoming absurdly uneasy.  It could not be possible that Eugenia’s accident had been repeated!  Or had she met him with inquiries?  But no! she was already gone.  The mystery was presently cleared, however, by the abrupt appearance of Parkhurst running towards them, but without his pail!  The cry of consternation and despair which greeted that discovery was, however, quickly changed by a single breathless, half intelligible sentence he had shot before him from his panting lips.  And he was holding something in his outstretched palm that was more eloquent than words.  Gold!

In an instant they had him under the shade of the pine-tree, and were squatting round him like schoolboys.  He was profoundly agitated.  His story, far from being brief, was incoherent and at times seemed irrelevant, but that was characteristic.  They would remember that he had always held the theory that, even in quartz mining, the deposits were always found near water, past or present, with signs of fluvial erosion!  He didn’t call himself one of your blanked scientific miners, but his head was level!  It was all very well for them to say “Yes, yes!” Now, but they didn’t use to!  Well! when he got to the spring, he noticed that there had been a kind of landslide above it, of course, from water cleavage, and there was a distinct mark of it on the mountain side, where it had uprooted and thrown over some small bushes!

Excited as Bray was, he recognized with a hysterical sensation the track made by Eugenia in her fall, which he himself had noticed.  But he had thought only of her.

“When I saw that,” continued Parkhurst, more rapidly and coherently, “I saw that there was a crack above the hole where the water came through—­as if it had been the old channel of the spring.  I widened it a little with my clasp knife, and then—­in a little pouch or pocket of decomposed quartz—­I found that!  Not only that, boys,” he continued, rising, with a shout, “but the whole slope above the spring is a mass of seepage underneath, as if you’d played a hydraulic hose on it, and it’s ready to tumble and is just rotten with quartz!”

The men leaped to their feet; in another moment they had snatched picks, pans, and shovels, and, the foreman leading, with a coil of rope thrown over his shoulders, were all flying down the trail to the highway.  Their haste was wise.  The spring was not on their claim; it was known to others; it was doubtful if Parkhurst’s discovery with his knife amounted to actual work on the soil.  They must “take it up” with a formal notice, and get to work at once!