pe.

"Here's hopin'," he said, with true Western magnanimity; then, with a
jerk of his head toward the thin column of stack smoke rising on the
still morning air from the Lawrenceburg: "I know this here ground, up
one side and down the other. Them fellers down yander 'll be grabbin'
fer ye, pronto, soon as they know you've struck pay."

"Why should they?" I asked, scenting a possible source of information.

"They own the ground on t' other side of ye, and ever'body allowed they
owned this."

"But their vein runs the other way--southeast and northwest," Gifford
interposed.

The old man winked his single eye.

"Ever been in their workin's?"

Gifford shook his head.

"N'r nobody else that could 'r would talk," said our ancient. "You
can't tell nothin' about which-a-way a vein runs in this here hell's
half-acre. Bart Blackwell's the whole show on the Lawrenceburg, and
he's a hawg. He's the one that ran them Nebraska farmers off'm the
Mary Mattock down yander: give 'em notice that he was goin' to sink on
them upper claims o' his'n at the gulch head, and that his sump water'd
have to be turned loose to go where it had a mind to--which'd be
straight down the gulch, o' course. The farmers they allowed that'd
swamp 'em worse'n they was already swamped--ez it would--so they up and
quit. Blackwell, he's a cuss, with a snoot like a hawg. He don't want
no neighbors."

I had been observing the old man's face as he talked. It was
villainous only in its featurings.

"Which are you; a prospector or a miner?" I asked.

"A little b'ilin' o' both, I reckon," was his rejoinder. "I driv' the
first tunnel in the Buckeye, and they made me boss on the
two-hundred-foot level. I kin shoot rock with any of 'em's long as I
kin make out to let the bug-juice alone."

"Are you out of work?"

"Sure thing."

I caught Gifford's eye and the carpenter nodded. We were going to need
men and more men, and here was a chance to begin on a man who knew the
Lawrenceburg, or at least some of the history of it.

"You're hired," I told him; and it was thus that we secured the most
faithful and efficient henchman that ever drew pay; a man who knew
nothing but loyalty, and who was, besides, a practical miner and a
skilful master of men.

Hicks--we carried him thus on the pay-roll, though he himself spelled
it "Hix," for short, as he said--left us to go back to town for his
dunnage, and Gifford, knowing that I had been on watch all nigh