I don't know just why we should have been afraid that anybody would have been foolish enough to try to "jump" an unworked claim; but we were, and we decided at once that we would not leave the ground unwatched now that our stakes were driven and our notice duly posted. Accordingly, Gifford went back to town to make the needful land-office entry and to bring out the supplies, tools, and a wagon-load of lumber for a shack, leaving me to stand guard with an old horse-pistol of Gifford's for a weapon. It was after dark when I heard the wagon trailing up the gulch, and I had had nothing to eat since morning. But I was free and hopeful--and happy; with the nightmare past becoming more and more a thing to be pushed aside and comfortably ignored. Looking back at it now, I can see that our venture was haphazard to the tenderfoot degree. Having built a sleeping shack out of the lumber, we picked a place for the prospect shaft solely with reference to its convenience on the hillside. But for this we had plenty of precedents. What the miners of any other district would have called sheer miracles of luck were the usual thing in the Cripple Creek region. From the earliest of the discoveries the region had been upsetting all the well-established mining traditions, and the tenderfoot was quite as likely to find mineral as was the most experienced prospector; more likely, in fact, since the man with everything to learn would not be hampered by the traditions. The top layer of fine gravel which answers for soil in the district carries gold "float"--"color," a Californian would say,--in numberless localities over an area of many square miles; a fact which was well known long before any one knew of the underlying treasures which have since been taken out of the deep workings. But there are no vein outcroppings on the surface, and the prospector's first task is to uncover the bed-rock by sinking one or more test pits through the gravel. In some one of these shallow shafts he may--or may not--make his discovery. If successful, he will find, on some well-cleaned surface of the bed-rock, a fine broken line; a minute vein in many instances so narrow as to be discoverable only by the use of a magnifying-glass; and that discolored line will be his invitation to dig deeper. By the morning of the second day Gifford had built our rude windlass, and the work of shaft sinking was begun. The gravel layer varies in thickness in different parts of the district, ranging from a few inches in some places to many feet in others. In our case we were less than waist-deep in the hole, and had not yet set up the windlass, when we reached the upper surface of the bed-rock.