But we went to work.  We decided to sink a shaft.  So, for a week we climbed the mountain, laden with picks, drills, gads, crowbars, shovels, cans of blasting powder and coils of fuse and strove with might and main.  At first the rock was broken and loose and we dug it up with picks and threw it out with shovels, and the hole progressed very well.  But the rock became more compact, presently, and gads and crowbars came into play.  But shortly nothing could make an impression but blasting powder.

That was the weariest work!  One of us held the iron drill in its place and another would strike with an eight-pound sledge—­it was like driving nails on a large scale.  In the course of an hour or two the drill would reach a depth of two or three feet, making a hole a couple of inches in diameter.  We would put in a charge of powder, insert half a yard of fuse, pour in sand and gravel and ram it down, then light the fuse and run.  When the explosion came and the rocks and smoke shot into the air, we would go back and find about a bushel of that hard, rebellious quartz jolted out.  Nothing more.  One week of this satisfied me.  I resigned.  Clagget and Oliphant followed.  Our shaft was only twelve feet deep.  We decided that a tunnel was the thing we wanted.

So we went down the mountain side and worked a week; at the end of which time we had blasted a tunnel about deep enough to hide a hogshead in, and judged that about nine hundred feet more of it would reach the ledge.  I resigned again, and the other boys only held out one day longer.  We decided that a tunnel was not what we wanted.  We wanted a ledge that was already “developed.”  There were none in the camp.

We dropped the “Monarch” for the time being.

Meantime the camp was filling up with people, and there was a constantly growing excitement about our Humboldt mines.  We fell victims to the epidemic and strained every nerve to acquire more “feet.”  We prospected and took up new claims, put “notices” on them and gave them grandiloquent names.  We traded some of our “feet” for “feet” in other people’s claims.  In a little while we owned largely in the “Gray Eagle,” the “Columbiana,” the “Branch Mint,” the “Maria Jane,” the “Universe,” the “Root-Hog-or-Die,” the “Samson and Delilah,” the “Treasure Trove,” the “Golconda,” the “Sultana,” the “Boomerang,” the “Great Republic,” the “Grand Mogul,” and fifty other “mines” that had never been molested by a shovel or scratched with a pick.  We had not less than thirty thousand “feet” apiece in the “richest mines on earth” as the frenzied cant phrased it—­and were in debt to the butcher.  We were stark mad with excitement—­drunk with happiness—­smothered under mountains of prospective wealth—­arrogantly compassionate toward the plodding millions who knew not our marvellous canyon—­but our credit was not good at the grocer’s.