Page:Allan Dunn--Dead Man's Gold.djvu/212

198 of them set off at a run toward the distant cliff. Half-way Harvey stopped and shouted:

"They ain't no sense in goin' over thar," he said. "Thar ain't no way to climb thet cliff. We got to go east or west to the nearest openin' and work back along the mesa to whar the stream didn't run so deep."

They stopped and looked at each other like a lot of foolish schoolboys.

"Of course," said Stone. "Look here, what's the use of fooling with the placer at all? It's hard to work and what's in it is nothing compared with the Madre d'Oro. It's all right as a side-issue. But the quartz is the big thing. The placer is only a pointer. We'll have to test it to make sure, but we might as well take the burros along and go after the big thing."

Harvey looked at him in surprise.

"Thar ain't likely to be no water up thar," he said "I don't rightly git you erbout that Madre d'Oro. That means the Mother Lode. I thought you was after a placer?"

Stone slapped him on the shoulder.

"We're after a chunk of the mother-lode, too, old man," he said. "And you'll be in on it, if it has to be out of my share."

"That'll be hall right," interjected Larkin.

"The water that once ran in that placer-bed came out of a big butte up on the mesa," said Stone. "There are several of them up there but this one was, I fancy, used as a sort of temple-fortress, from what