Gregory frowned, but laid the bit of ore gently on his palm and regarded it with awe. He wanted gold, but at least this was his, and the first of his treasure to be torn from its sanctuary. For a moment the merely personal longing was lost in the enthusiasm of the geologist, for the fragment in his hand was very beautiful, a soft rich shaded green flecked with red; the vugs, or little cells, looked as if lined with deep green velvet. But he turned and stared at the mining camp beyond his boundary line. One of the bits of float he had found last year had been gold quartz. Had it travelled, a mere chip, from the original body to this distant point, or danced here on the shoulders of an earthquake? Float, even under a layer of soil was often found so far from the ore body, that it was a more fallible guide than a prospector’s guess. He walked to the end of the hill, while his miners shrugged their shoulders and resumed the drilling. The great vein of the Primo mine was dipping acutely to the right. Might it not be wise for him to abandon his present position and sink a shaft close to the line, trusting to his practical knowledge and highly organized faculty to strike the vein? He stood for half an hour debating the question, listening to the intermittent roar of the engine, the rattle of ore dumped from the buckets. Then he walked back to the red gash in his own land. It would be the bitterest disappointment of his life if he failed to find gold in his hill, but the dominant voice in his brain was always practical, and it advised him to follow the willing metal for the present instead of incurring the expense of a shaft and possible litigation. “’Nother stringer!” announced one of the men, as Gregory arrived at the long deep cut. “Guess it’s time for a windlass.” “Guess it is. Go down to the house and get some lumber.” He descended into the cut and looked at the unmistakable evidence of little veins. Were they really stringer, tentacles of a great ore body climbing toward the surface, or a mere series of independent and insignificant veins not worth exploiting? He was in a pessimistic mood, but laughed suddenly as he realised how disappointed he would be should further excavation demonstrate there was no chamber of copper ore below.