Jeffard examined the rude sketch and pronounced it good enough; after which he folded the paper absently and put it in his pocket. Garvin did not notice his failure to return it,--if, indeed, he thought or cared anything further about it,--and went on talking of his own unwisdom in driving a tunnel on a lode which did not "look right." "We'll know better, this trip," he asserted, as somewhat of a salve to the former hurt. "We'll go higher up the gulch and sink a shaft; that's about what we'll do." And this, in the fullness of time, was what they did. After a few days, Jeffard was able to inch his way by easy stages to the new location; and by the time Garvin had dug and blasted himself into a square pit windlass-deep, the convalescent was strong enough to take his place at the hoist. From the very first, Jeffard was totally unable to share Garvin's enthusiastic faith in the possibilities of the new cast for fortune. Ignorant of the first principles of practical metal-digging, he was, none the less, a fairly good laboratory metallurgist; while Garvin, on the other hand, knew naught of man's, but much of nature's, book. Hence there arose many discussions over the possibilities; Jeffard contending that the silver-bearing lodes of the valley were not rich enough to bear pack-train transportation to the nearest railway point; and Garvin clinging tenaciously to the prospectors' theory that a "true-fissure" vein must of necessity prove a very Golconda once you had gone deep enough into its storehouse. When all was said, the man of the laboratory won a barren victory. At thirty feet the lode in the shaft had dwindled to a few knife-blade seams, and the last shot fired in the bottom of the excavation put an end to the work of exploitation by letting in a flood of water. Since they had no means of draining the shaft so suddenly transformed into a well, Garvin gave over, perforce, but proposed trying their luck elsewhere in the valley before seeking a new field. Jeffard acquiesced, with the suggestion that they save time by prospecting in different directions; and this they did, Garvin taking the upper half of the valley and Jeffard the lower. At the end of a week, Jeffard gave up in disgust; and when his companion begged for yet one other day, was minded to stay in camp and invite his soul in idleness until the persevering one should be convinced. As a matter of course, Garvin's day multiplied itself by three, and Jeffard wore out the interval as best he might, tramping the hillsides in the vicinity of the cabin to kill time, and smoking uncounted pipes on the doorstep in the cool of the day while waiting for Garvin's return.