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 scale. Among the numerous unworked claims lying higher up the gulch, beyond and adjoining our proposed location, we found three whose ownership we traced, through a number of transfers apparently designed to hide something, to the Lawrenceburg. Barrett, a fine, keen-witted young fellow whose real name, if I might give it, would be familiar to everybody in the West, was the first to draw the probable inference. "Jimmie, you've got the longest head in the bunch," was his comment; this because I had chanced to be the one to make the discovery of the well-concealed ownership. "At some period in the history of the Lawrenceburg, which is one of the oldest mines on Bull Mountain, its owners have had reason to believe that their pay streak was going to run the other way--to the northeast. They undertook to cover the chance by making these locations quietly, and through 'dummy' locators, on the other side of the spur." "But how did they come to overlook this patch we're figuring on?" asked Gifford, the carpenter.