"I am trying to ferret out this gold mining business from the beginning," he wrote. "I never got the hang of it before, and, if Mr. Steele wasn't everlasting patient with me, I wouldn't be getting much now, because everything is so new and strange here. I don't half understand the men's lingo, because they have a strange name for everything.... Well, it seems that a gold mine up here is started in some such a way as this: along comes a prospector--quartz crazy, he is called if he's in dead earnest--with a pick and shovel, a hammer and microscope, and a camp outfit. If some one else has provided him with food and the outfit he is 'grub-staked' and his 'pard' is entitled to half of the results of his work. Father, for instance, has grub-staked Weimer for years. This prospector pegs away at the rocks, getting specimens of ore and examining them under his microscope. He goes right past rocks that look to me full of gold they glitter so. No gold in such! But when he finds some common, dull old stone that doesn't show up much to me but has all the earmarks of 'a high value' in gold, then he thinks he has found the outcropping of a good 'lead,' because all the rock that is behind that rock in the same strata is supposed to have that much gold in it or more. So there he 'stakes his claim.' You see I've got the hang of a few of the terms already. First, he drives a stake near the rock and leaves on it a paper with his name and the date and a notice that the land is his for so many feet each way. He can't take possession of more than six hundred feet one way and fifteen hundred the other in one claim, but he can stake off as many other claims right beside this first as he wants to. The staking is easy enough, but the tug of war comes in doing enough work to patent the claims! This means to get a deed of possession from the state. There is where Weimer and I are up against it--on the work side! But guess I'd better not make your heads ache any more with such an accumulation of learned facts. I'll just say good-bye now and continue the headache in my next." To his father he wrote a different kind of letter, a defense of his delay at Dry Creek. "I couldn't desert a man in that shape," he wrote, "although I have lost three weeks at exactly the season of the year, I find, when three weeks count for the most. I'm sorry it happened that way, but I shall try to put in good time now and make up. Anyway, I guess the delay is as broad as it is long, because, if that accident hadn't occurred, I shouldn't have known Steele; and it's his help that's smoothing things out here for me to begin work." Ross did not know that the way he had conducted himself at Dry Creek was the cause of the very practical interest which Steele was taking in him. But not all of Steele's influence in Camp had secured a single laborer for Meadow Creek. Ross found that Andy's explanation on the Cody stage held good. No one cared to go any further out of the world than Miners' Camp.