f the inquisitive young woman,
weighing in the balance with some other things, that determined my
immediate future course. The work on the branch line was completed,
and my employers had taken a dam-building contract in Idaho. I was
offered the job of bookkeeper and paymaster, combined, on the new work,
with a substantial raise in salary, and the temptation to accept was
very strong. But I argued, foolishly, perhaps, that so long as I
remained in the same service as that in which she had discovered me,
Agatha Geddis would always be able to trace me; that my best chance was
to lose myself again as speedily as possible.

The "losing" opportunity had already offered itself. By this time I
had made a few acquaintances in town and was beginning to be bitten by
the mining bug. Though I was a late comer in the district, and Cripple
Creek had fully caught its stride as one of the greatest gold-producing
camps in the world some time before my advent, "strikes" were still
occurring frequently enough to keep the gold seekers' excitement from
dying out. With the greater part of my Hadley-and-Shelton earnings in
my pocket, and with muscles camp-hardened sufficiently to enable me to
hold my own as a workingman, I decided to take a chance and become a
prospector.

We went at it judiciously and with well-considered plans, three of us:
the bank teller, Barrett, a young carpenter named Gifford, and myself.
Altogether we could pool less than a thousand dollars of capital, but
we determined to make the modest stake suffice. By this time the
entire district had been plotted and replotted into mining claims;
hence we did our preliminary prospecting in the records of the land
office. A careful search revealed a number of infinitesimally small
areas as yet uncovered by the many criss-crossing claims; and among
these we chose a triangular-shaped bit of mountain side on the farther
slope of Bull Mountain, with a mine called the "Lawrenceburg," a fairly
large producer, for our nearest neighbor.

There was a good bit of discussion precedent to the making of this
decision. Barrett thought that we stood but a slight chance of finding
mineral in the over-prospected area. The Lawrenceburg was a full
quarter of a mile distant from our triangle, and its "pay-streak" was
said to dip southward, while our gulch slope lay on the other side of a
spur and due northeast. It was a further examination of the
land-office records that turned the scal