“You’re coming along nicely, Phil,” he chuckled. “A few more weeks of this, and you’ll be able to qualify for a post-graduate course in the higher profanities. Not but what you are fairly fluent, as it is.” Philip made no reply; he was silent through the scarcely less difficult descent into a wide basin on the eastern front of the range. On the lower level the going was easier, and in the latter half of the afternoon they came to the farther lip of the high-pitched basin from which they could look down into the valley of the Arkansas; into the valley and across it to a distant, shack-built camp city spreading upward from a series of gulch heads over swelling hills with mighty mountains for a background--the great carbonate camp whose fame was by this time penetrating to the remotest hamlet in the land. A yellow streak winding up one of the swelling hills marked the course of the stage road, and on it, in a cloud of golden dust, one of the rail-head stages drawn by six horses was worming its way upward from the river valley. “Think we can make it before dark?” Bromley asked. “We’ve got to make it,” Philip declared doggedly; adding: “I’m not going to wait another day before I find out what we’ve got in that hole we’ve been digging. Come on.” The slogging march was resumed, but distances are marvelously deceptive in the clear air of the altitudes, and darkness was upon them before the lights of the big camp came in sight over the last of the hills. Bromley, thoroughly outworn by the three-days’ forced march coming upon the heels of two weeks of drilling and blasting and shovelling, had no curiosity sharp enough to keep him going, after the burros had been stabled and lodgings had been secured in the least crowded of the hotels; but Philip bolted his supper hastily and announced his intention of proceeding at once in search of an assay office. “You won’t find one open at this time of night,” the play-boy yawned. “There’s another day coming, or if there isn’t, it won’t matter for any of us.” “I tell you, I’m not going to wait!” Philip snapped impatiently; and he departed, leaving Bromley to smoke and doze in the crowded and ill-smelling hotel office which also served as the bar-room. It was perhaps an hour later when Bromley, who, in spite of the noise and confusion of the place, had been sleeping the sleep of utter exhaustion in his chair in the corner of the smoke-befogged bar-room, was awakened by a shot, a crash of glass and a strident voice bellowing, “_Yippee!_ That’s the kind of a hellion I am! Walk up, gen’lemen, an’ le’s irrigate; the drinks’re on me. Th’ li’l’ ol’ prospect hole’s gone an’ turned an ace an’ I’m paintin’ the town. _Yippee!_ Line up, gen’lemen, an’ name yer pizen. Big Ike’s buyin’ fer th’ crowd!”