One dull day in early December, when the sky had not lightened even at noon, a monotonous day in the Hinds House, since there had been no impromptu concert and the cards had been running with unsensational evenness, while every thread-bare topic seemed completely talked out, Uncle Bill walked restlessly to the window and by the waning light turned a bit of "rock" over in his hand.
The sight was too much for Yankee Sam, who hastily joined him.
"Think you got anything, Bill?"
"I got a hell-uv-a-lot of somethin' or a hell-uv-a-lot of nothin'. It's forty feet across the face."
"Shoo!" Sam took it from him and picked at it with a knife-point, screwing a glass into his eye to inspect the particle which he laid out carefully in his palm.
"Looks like somethin' good."
"When I run a fifty foot tunnel into a ledge of antimony over on the Skookumchuck it looked like somethin' good." Uncle Bill added drily: "I ain't excited."
"It might be one of them rar' minerals." Yankee Sam hefted it judicially. "What do you hold it at?"
"Anything I can git."
"You ought to git ten thousand dollars easy when Capital takes holt."
"I'd take a hundred and think I'd stuck the feller, if I could git cash."
"A hundred!" Yankee Sam flared up in instant wrath. "It's cheap fellers like you that's killin' this camp!"
"Mortification had set in on this camp 'fore I ever saw it, Samuel," replied Uncle Bill calmly. "I was over in the Buffalo Hump Country doin' assessment work fifteen hundred feet above timber-line when the last Live One pulled out of Ore City. They ain't been one in since to my knowledge. The town's so quiet you can hear the fish come up to breathe in Lemon Crick and I ain't lookin' for a change soon."
"You wait till spring."
"I wore out the bosoms of two pair of Levi Strauss's every winter since 1910 waitin' for spring, and I ain't seen nothin' yet except Capital makin' wide circles around Ore City. This here camp's got a black eye."
"And who give it a black eye?" demanded Yankee Sam wrathfully. "Who done it but knockers like you? I 'spose if Capital was settin' right alongside you'd up and tell 'em you never saw a ledge yet in this camp hold out below a hundred feet?"
Uncle Bill replied tranquilly: "Would if they ast me."
"You'd rather see us all starve than boost."
"Jest as lief as to lie."
"Well, that's what we're goin' to do if somethin' don't happen this Spring. She'll own this camp. Porcupine Jim turned over 'the Underdog' yesterday and Lannigan's finished eatin' on 'The Gold-dust Twins'." He moved away disconsolately. "Lord, I wish the stage would get in."