Page:Allan Dunn--Dead Man's Gold.djvu/20

6 end of a month after the grub and explosives had been bought, but a share of the shack and what it held, of the shaft and what they might find at the bottom. Stone did not expect to find a fortune there. Wat Lyman was the one who leavened the Foursome with faith in their prospect.

Jim Stone had located the claim and, mainly because he did not know how to go about its development, he took in as his first partner Lyman, back from one of his perennial pilgrimages and looking for a grubstake. Frank Healy, happening along, offered some money at a time when the monthly checks had failed suddenly, owing to a prostrate market and an undeclared dividend. So drifted together the Foursome, and thus the embryo mine was named by Stone.

Stone held the drill and spooned the muck at the bottom of the hole. Lyman pounded and set the charges of dynamite. Healy cooked, and cooked well; there was no one in Skyfields who fared as well as the "Foursome." Lefty handled the little forge and the resharpening of the drills and kept the shack in shape. It was a peculiar twist of Lefty's make-up that the little cabin was as neat and clean as if some precisian of an old maid had presided over its keeping, rather than a wandering Cockney of low mental and moral calibre.

For the last week Stone had been taking occasional turns at the sledge to relieve Lyman, for the porphyry was hard as cement. Lyman was easily twice his age, with a few years thrown in, and Stone