Into the spot Terry plunged the spade. The dirt was gravelly and soft--two strokes of the blade were more than enough to loosen sufficient for the three pans. The pans were sheet-iron and about the size and shape of a large milk-pan. In a moment they three were trailing down to the little creek, each with some two inches of the dirt in the bottom of his pan. They squatted to fill the pans with water, and carefully twirled to slop it out again along with the dirt that ought to float off. This was an anxious process. Archie finished first, because he was in practice. "I didn't get anything this time," he announced, gaily. "But I don't care. I'm going out." Terry's dirt had practically all flowed off. He picked out the bits of gravel--they were only pebbles and flakes of rock. He peered for yellow--yes, there it was! A glint mingled with a seam of coarse sand. "I've got some!" he yelled. "See here? I've got some!" Archie looked in. "That's right. Let me finish it for you. I'll flirt that sand out." So he did, with a dexterous twirl that sent part of the sand out and the rest against the sides, and left the heavier yellow in the middle. "Reckon I've landed a little, myself," remarked Harry. He had! Perhaps a trifle more than Terry, and the two pans together weren't enough to cover the point of the knife-blade with which they scraped the yellow up and carefully deposited it in Father Richards' old buckskin bag, brought for the purpose. "Gold's worth $21 an ounce and that's about a pennyweight, I guess," encouraged Archie. "Ninety cents--but it's a beginning. Of course, where you dug I'd been digging before. You'll find a better place. You see, I've already taken out $80. So go ahead and keep panning, and I'll travel." Archie had arranged to leave with a wagon outfit who were disgusted because they'd discovered nothing. The two new proprietors of the Golden Prize stopped operations long enough to bid him good-bye, and watch him trudge away, his pack on his back. "When you want some of your gold, come back or let us know," called Harry, after. "It's all yours," he retorted. "That's why I bought the mine." "Jiminy!" exclaimed Terry. "That's big pay for what little we did--just giving him a drink of water and toting him in a cart." The next few pans didn't yield anything at all; then Harry made a "strike," as he called it, and scraped out as much yellow as would cover a finger-nail. He'd got the dirt from a new spot, "for luck," and from the same spot Terry managed to extract about as much. "We'll have to try about," counseled Harry, "until we find spots like those of Archie's. We've got a lot of space yet."