I may say, in passing, that this attitude was characteristic of our carpenter partner. He was a country boy from Southern Indiana; a natural-born mechanic, with only a common school education. But he had initiative and a good gift of horse sense and balance, and in the troublous times that followed he was always our level-headed stand-by. Acting upon his most sensible suggestion, we took our time, spelling each other in shoveling out the debris. The two shots driven in opposite corners had deepened the shaft over two feet. When the new bottom of the hole was uncovered we nearly had a return of the frenzies. The discolored line of the vein had widened to four inches or more, and the last of the broken rock shoveled out was freely mixed with fragments of the bluish-brown gangue-matter. A hasty estimate assured us that we had a sufficient quantity of the lode matter for a trial assay, and we spent the better part of the afternoon picking out pieces of the ore on the small dump and in chipping more of them from the exposed face of the seam. It was arranged that one of us should take the samples to town after dark, for the sake of secrecy, and we put in what daylight there was left after our sample was prepared drilling another set of holes--though we did not fire them. Leaving Gifford to stand guard over what now might be something well worth guarding, I made my way down the mountain after supper with the two small sacks of selected samples. True to his promise, I found Barrett already established in a rather cheap boarding-house. He was surprised to see me so soon, and more than surprised when I showed him the specimens of bluish rock. "Say--by George!" he exclaimed; "that sure does look like the real stuff, Jimmie; though of course you can't tell. Have you roasted any of it?" I was so green a miner at that time that I did not know what "roasting" meant. Barrett had a tiny coal-stove in his room with a bit of fire in it. Even the June nights are sometimes chilly at the Cripple Creek altitude. Selecting a bit of the stone he put it upon the fire-shovel among the coals and while it was heating listened to my recounting of the short and exciting story of the "find." When the piece of bluish stone had been roasted and cooled we did not need the magnifying-glass. It was covered with a dew of fine pin-point yellow globules. Barrett went up in the air as if his chair had exploded under him. "My God, Jimmie!" he choked, "it's--it's a _bonanza_!" The next step was to have authoritative assays made, and together we took the two small sacks of ore to the sampling works, which, at that time, were running day and night. We waited in the office while the tests were being made. The result, which came to us well past midnight, was enough to upset the equanimity of a wooden Indian. Some of the selected samples carried values as high as twenty-five dollars in gold--not to the ton; oh, no; nothing like that: _to the pound_!