We scrambled rather wearily, but with a dogged determination, out of our shallow hole. Our blue-eyed, long-bearded friend was sitting on a convenient boulder near at hand, his pipe between his teeth, watching our operations. "Got any tobacco, boys?" he inquired genially. "Smoked my last until to-night, unless you'll lend." Yank produced a plug, from which the stranger shaved some parings. "Struck the dirt?" he inquired. "No, I see you haven't." He stretched himself and arose. "You aren't washing this stuff!" he cried in amazement, as his eye took in fully what we were about. Then we learned what we might have known before--but how should we?--that the gold was not to be found in any and every sort of loose earth that might happen to be lying about, but only in either a sort of blue clay or a pulverized granite. Sometimes this "pay dirt" would be found atop the ground. Again, the miner had to dig for it. "All the surface diggings are taken up," our friend told us. "So now you have to dig deep. It's about four feet down where I'm working. It'll probably be deeper up here. You'd better move back where you were." Yank, stretched himself upright. "Look here," he said decidedly; "let's get a little sense into ourselves. Here's our pore old hosses standing with their packs on, and we no place to stay, and no dinner; and we're scratchin' away at this bar like a lot of fool hens. There's other days comin'." Johnny and I agreed with the common sense of the thing, but reluctantly. Now that we knew how, our enthusiasm surged up again. We wanted to get at it. The stranger's eyes twinkled sympathetically. "Here, boys," said he, "I know just how you feel. Come with me." He snatched up our bucket and strode back to his own claim, where he filled the receptacle with some of the earth he had thrown out. "Go pan that," he advised us kindly. We raced to the water, and once more stirred about the heavy contents of the pail until they had floated off with the water. In the bottom lay a fine black residue; and in that residue glittered the tiny yellow particles. We had actually panned our first gold! Our friend examined it critically. "That's about a twelve-cent pan," he adjudged it. Somehow, in a vague way, we had unreasonably expected millions at a twist of the wrist; and the words, "twelve cents," had a rankly penurious sound to us. However, the miner patiently explained that a twelve-cent pan was a very good one; and indubitably it was real gold. Yank, being older and less excitable, had not accompanied us to the waterside. "Well, boys," he drawled, "that twelve cents is highly satisfactory, of course; but in the meantime we've lost about six hundred dollars' worth of hoss and grub." Surely enough, our animals had tired of waiting for us, and had moved out packs and all. We hastily shouldered our implements. "Don't you want to keep this claim next me?" inquired our acquaintance. We stopped. "Surely!" I replied. "But how do we do it?"