“Come here,” he said. “I made this map some time ago, and calculated to a day when you would lose the vein. I guessed our vein had faulted before Amalgamated got busy. But don’t worry. They’re either on a parallel vein or on a mere fork.” His pencil moved along the vein already stoped, travelled over the fault line and recovered a vein further down. “Hundred feet,” he said. “With air drills and unless the fault breccia is uncommonly hard, which I don’t think is the case, we should find it in less than three weeks. They can’t get through that rock for at least a month. Even then they may not touch us, but then again they may, and we must be there first. Cut across the fault at once and follow it on the footwall side to the east. Get well into the footwall. If you don’t recover the vein inside of a hundred feet I’ll stand to lose a thousand dollars and you’ll be the winner.” “I guess not,” said Mann admiringly. “But, by jing! I was worried. You never can tell about them faults. When the old earth split herself up and got to slipping she not only lost one side of herself sometimes, but twisted about as if she was having fun with the apex law of Montana in advance. But I figure out that you’re like old Marcus Daly--you’ve got a sort of X-ray in your eye that sees the ore winking below. So long.” He departed to carry encouragement to the anxious miners, and Gregory went out and walked along his hill. By this time he knew every inch of it, and had found indications of ore in his other claims while superintending the development work necessary before perfecting his patents. If Amalgamated sank on his present vein and the courts enjoined him from working it until the matter of apex rights was settled, he would simply go ahead and sink through the carbonates in his other claims to those vast deposits of chalcopyrite with which he was convinced his hill was packed. He knew the geological history of every mine in Montana, and while he had given up all hope of finding gold on his estate save in small incidental values, he believed that he possessed one of the greatest copper deposits in the Rocky Mountains. And now that even one vein of his hill was threatened, he dismissed his old dreams with a shrug and transferred his undivided affection to the exciting treasure the earth had given him. There were few surprises in gold mines. A great copper mine might make geological history. In two districts, Butte and Castle Mountain, copper glance, an ore of secondary enrichment, had been found far down in the sulphide zone below chalcopyrite, chief of the primary ores. He believed that he should find glance at depth of nine hundred feet. If there were masses of it he should take out millions in a year, for chalcopyrite was the richest of the permanent copper ores of this region, running as high as 79.8.