"Gentlemen," says he, "just stick your pick in anywhere's--one place is just as good as another. [That was the gospel truth.] But if you don't know just where to start suppose we try an old miner's trick, that Mr. Johnson there, I make no doubt, has done a hundred times." Johnson, he smiled hearty. "Yes, yes! That old game!" says he. "I'd nearly forgot all about it--let's see--how is it you do it?" "First you throw up a rock," says Ag. "Oh, now I remember! Sure!" says Johnson. "You throw up a rock----" He stopped, smiling feeble and uncertain, waiting to hear the rest of it. "Suppose we let Mr. Daggett [that was the tinhorn] do the throwing?" says Aggy. "He's a new chum, and we fellers always feel they have the luck. You may think this is all foolish superstition," says he, turning to the gambler, "but I tell you, honest, there's a good deal in it," and that was the second true thing Ag said that day. Daggett, he threw up the rock. "Now, go and stand over it," says Ag. Daggett's goes over according, but he ain't pointed in the right direction. "Now, you turn around three times." But after he done it we weren't no better oft than before, for the chump landed just as he had started. Ag surveyed the ground. "Now, you walk backward three steps, then four to the left, then back five more--ain't that it?" turning to Johnson. "That's it!" says Johnson, slapping his leg. "That's her! The same old game! Lord! how it all comes back to a feller!" "And just where you land, you dig," finishes Ag, handing Daggett's pick. Daggett sinks the pick to the eye the first crack. "Gosh!" says he. "Seems kind of soft here!" "Is that so?" cried Aggy, highly excited. "Then you've struck gold for sure!" Having put it there himself he felt reasonably certain about it. Well, they scraped up the bedrock, and Aggy offered to let Johnson pan it, but Johnson said he'd had to quit mining because his hands got so sore swinging a pan, so Daggett he kind of scrambled the dirt out after a fashion, and there at the bottom was our ounce and a half of gold! Well, I want to tell you there was some movement around there. We weren't in the same fix of a friend of mine who loaded a pan for a tenderfoot with four solid ounces, and when he slid the water around on that nice little yeller new moon in the corner of the pan, "Humph!" says the tenderfoot, "don't you get any more gold than that out of so much dirt?" Four ounces to the pan only means about a hundred thousand dollars a day income. "Gooramighty!" says my friend, plumb disgusted. "I'd have had to borrow all the dust there is on the creek to satisfy you--did you think it was all gold?"