"And what's more and queerer, I'm in danger of getting interested in gold mining for itself. Every time I push our little car out to the end of the dump and unload the ore I wonder how much gold I'm watching roll away down the incline. Aunt Anne, you said in your last that it seems such a waste to throw away the ore. Well, if you were here you'd find it a greater waste of good money to try to get money out of the quartz under present conditions. You see there are only a few dollars' worth of gold in a ton of rock. That ton would have to be 'packed,' as they say here, eighty miles over the roughest of trails to Cody, and there loaded on cars and sent clear to Omaha, our nearest smelter. And I guess you know more than I do about the costly process of crushing ore and extracting gold from it in a smelter. It's not like mining for 'pay dirt,' as the men here call placer mining, where you gather up sand and wash it out yourself and find the particles of gold in the bottom of your pan. This quartz digging is the most expensive kind of mining there is. But when the Burlington gets the branch road up into Miners' the ore can be loaded at the mines and unloaded in Omaha without change of cars. Then we'll dig out the dumps and send them to the smelter, and back will come the gold jingling into our pockets. But whenever I'm moved to give you information I feel small, for I believe, in spite of all you write, that you both know more than I do about it now. "I haven't had a book in my hand, Uncle Fred. When it comes night, I am too tired to understand the newspapers that I bring over from Miners', to say nothing of delving in histology. I expect I shall forget all I ever knew, but never mind! If I can get those claims patented, and so satisfy father, then next year I'll begin over again to fit myself for college--guess what I knew once will come back when I've studied a little. Anyway, I'm not going to worry about it now." Ross underscored those last words to convince himself that he was not worrying, and handed the letter over to Bill Travers to be mailed at Meeteetse. To his father Ross proudly wrote of the week's progress in the tunnel, adding in reply to a rather longer letter than usual, which he found awaiting him in Camp, "No, I have no intention of throwing up the job." His father had opened the way wide for him to "throw up the job" after receiving the letter he had requested Steele to fill with exact information. That part of the information which stated that Ross must necessarily be shut up in Meadow Creek Valley for months with a more or less weak-headed partner had led to the letter which Ross found awaiting him. But Ross, Junior, was not well enough acquainted with Ross, Senior, to understand that this letter was an invitation for him to return East.