"So I'll have the time of my life doing it, but I'll get things just the same, and leave them for you. And I'll bring you reading--oh, have you put down candles, Jack? You'll need a lot of them, so you can read evenings." "What's the matter with pine knots?" Jack inquired. "Daniel Boone was great on pine-knot torches, if I remember right. One thing I wish you would do, Marion. I'll give you the money to send for about a million Araby cigarettes. I'll write down the address--where I always bought them. Think you could get by with it? "You just watch me. Say, I do think this is going to be the best kind of a winter! I wouldn't miss being up here for anything." Jack looked at her doubtfully, but he finally nodded his head in assent. "It could be worse," he qualified optimistically. CHAPTER FOURTEEN MURPHY HAS A HUMOROUS MOOD Though Fred and the professor shouldered pick and shovel at sunrise every morning and laid them down thankfully at dusk every night, they could not hope to work out the assessment upon eight mining claims in a year. The professor was not a success as a pick-and-shovel man, though he did his best. He acquired a row of callouses on each hand and a chronic ache in his back, but beyond that he did not accomplish very much. Fred was really the brawn of the undertaking, and in a practical way he was the brains also. Fred saw at once that the task required more muscle than he and the professor could furnish, so he hired a couple of men and set them to work on the claims of the speculators. Two little old Irishmen, these were; men who had dried down to pure muscle and bone as to their bodies, and to pure mining craft and tenacious memory for the details of their narrow lives as to brains. The mountains produce such men. In the barren plains country they would be called desert rats, but in the mountains they are called prospectors.