ly tiny yellow specks, perhaps mixed with white quartz, the
miner would try to find where it rolled from and would ascend the
gully, or mountain torrent, or precipice. Queer stories are told of
how during that winter almost bankrupt grocers grubstaked prospectors
with bacon and flour and received a half-interest in a mine that
yielded five or six hundred dollars a day in nuggets.

But for one who found a mine a thousand found nothing. The sensations
of the lucky one beggared description. 'Was it luck or was it
perseverance?' I asked the man who found one of the richest
silver-mines in the Big Bend of the Columbia. 'Both and mostly
dogged,' he answered. 'Take our party as a type of prospectors from
'59 to '89, the thirty years when the most of the mining country was
exploited. We had come up, eleven {23} green kids and one old man,
from Washington. We had roughed it in East and West Kootenay and were
working south to leave the country dead broke. We had found "float" in
plenty, and had followed it up ridges and over divides across three
ranges of mountains. Our horses were plumb played out. We had camped
on a ridge to let them fatten up enough to beat it out of British
Columbia for ever. Well, we found some galena "floats" in a dry gully
on the other side of the valley. We had provisions left for only
eleven days. Some of the boys said they would go out and shoot enough
deer to last us for meat till we could get out of the country. Old
Sandy and I thought we would try our luck for just one day. We
followed that "float" clear across the valley. We found more up the
bed of a raging mountain torrent; but the trouble was that the stream
came over a rock sheer as the wall of a house. I was afraid we'd lose
the direction if we left the stream bed, but I could see high up the
precipice where it widened out in a bench. You couldn't reach it from
below, but you could from above, so we blazed the trees below to keep
our direction and started up round the hog's back to drop to the bank
under. By now it was nightfall, and we hadn't had {24} anything to eat
since six that morning. Old Sandy wanted to go back, but I wouldn't
let him. He was trembling like an aspen leaf. It is so often just the
one pace more that wins or loses the race. We laboured up that slope
and reached the bench just at dark. We were so tired we had hauled
ourselves up by trees, brushwood branches, anything. I looked over the
edge of the r