We felt that for one day we had seen enough and were ready to head back to the entrance and call it a day. The bats were apparently the sole tenants of the cave, for we saw no evidence of any other living thing ever having invaded its dark, vast interior. Lynn headed up the ladder first and I asked him to go to the wagon and get four small cloth sacks for me. When he dropped them through the opening, Andy and I went back to where the guano was and filled the sacks. I wanted to have the guano tested to make sure it was of good enough quality to make my contemplated mining operation worth while. It would be silly to go to all the trouble of getting this guano to the surface and into Carlsbad, only to find that it was of inferior quality and not worth the cost and trouble of extracting it. "How are you going to get this stuff up to the surface?" Andy asked as I was filling the sacks. "By Ned, I don't know, but there's a way, and I'll find it." As we wound our way back to the rope ladder, Andy and I each had two sacks of the guano, one in each hand. We made it up the ladder and out into the open again. "Now I'm going to do something about marking this place, to show I've been here." A short distance from the entrance to the cave was a mescal pit, possibly left by Indians. "Here, Andy, give me a hand," and with that we began gathering several large stones and placed them one on top of another until we had a pile some four or five feet high. This would have to serve as a marker until the claim could be completed. "Well, what do you think, Lynn? Was it worth the trip?" I asked. "Didn't know there were so many bats in the world," he replied. "The size of that cave is unbelievable," was Andy's comment. "How big do you suppose that cave really is, anyhow?" "That's anybody's guess. Maybe we saw it all today, and maybe we saw only a small part of it," was my humble answer. "Bet that entrance is a busy place at sunrise and sunset," Lynn observed. It was clear to see he was more interested in the millions of bats than the size of the cave. "I'd like to get more torches and see more of that bat cave." "Some day we will," I replied. "Right now we're heading back to Carlsbad. I'm not going to waste any time filing a mining claim." And with that the three of us climbed aboard the wagon and headed down the hill. 4 The First Guano Is Mined News spreads fast. Soon everyone in Carlsbad had heard about the big cave that Lynn, Andy and myself had been describing. Many of the people thought it was just a story we had cooked up and wouldn't believe us. Of course it was known there were caves in the Guadalupe Mountains in that area of the state, but no one thought the cave we described could be as large as we claimed it was.