elligent men than these three.

They should have looked one night under the bedding in Casey's bunk.
More important still would have been the safeguarding of their "giant
powder" and caps and fuse. They should not have left it in a gouged,
open hollow under a boulder near the dugout. They were not burdened by
the weight of their brains, I imagine.

Just here I should like to say a few words to those who are wholly
ignorant of the devastating power contained in "giant powder"--which is
dynamite. If you have never had any experience with the stuff, you are
likely to go out with a bang and a puff of bluish-brown smoke when you
go. On the other hand, you may believe the weird tales one reads now
and then, of how whole mountainsides have been thrown down by the
discharge of a few sticks of dynamite. Or of one man striking terror
to the very souls of a group of mutinous miners by threatening to throw
a piece at them. Very well, now this is the truth without any frills
of exaggeration or any belittlement:

Dynamite MAY go off by being thrown so that it lands with a jar, but it
is not likely to be so hasty as all that. Whole boxes of it have been
dropped off wagons traveling over rough trails, with no worse effect
than a nervous chill down the spine of the driver of the wagon. It is
true that old stuff, after lying around for months and months through
varying degrees of temperature, may perform erratically, exploding when
it shouldn't and refusing to explode when it should. The average miner
refuses to take a chance with stale "giant" if he can get hold of fresh.

One stick the size of an ordinary candle, and from that to a maximum
amount of four sticks, may be used to "load" a hole eighteen to
twenty-four inches long, drilled into living rock. The amount of
dynamite used depends upon the quality of rock to be broken and the
skill and good judgment of the miner. In average hard-rock mining,
from three to five of these holes are drilled in a space four-by-six
feet in area.

A stick of dynamite is exploded by inserting in one end of the stick a
high-power detonating cap which will deliver a twenty-pound blow per
X--whatever that means. From three- to six-X caps are used in ordinary
mining. Three-X caps sometimes fail to explode a stick of dynamite. A
six-X cap, delivering a one-hundred-and-twenty-pound blow, may be
counted upon to do the work without fail.

The cap itself is exploded by a spark running through a