I should have liked to wait and hear whether or not he made his touch-down. The shaft of the Last Chance Mine is at the top of the Bachelor Mountain, and one has to climb and slip for an hour and a half to reach it. A very nice Yale boy guided me there, and seemed as willing as myself to sit down in the snow every ten minutes and look at the scenery. But we saw much more of the scenery than of the mine, because there was more of it to see, and there was no general manager to prevent us from looking as long as we liked. The trail led over fallen logs and up slippery rocks caked with ice and through drifts of snow higher than one’s head, and the pines accompanied us all the way with branches bent to the mountain-side with the weight of the snow, and a cold, cheery mountain stream appeared and disappeared from under long bridges of ice and mocked at us for our slow progress. But we gave it a very close race coming down. Sometimes we walked in the cold, dark shadows of the pines, where hardly a ray of sunlight came, and again the trail would cross a landslide, and the wind brought strong odors of the pine and keen, icy blasts from the snow-capped ranges which stretched before us for fifty miles, and we could see Creede lying at our feet like a box of spilled jackstraws. Every now and then we met long lines of burros carrying five bags of ore each, with but twenty dollars’ worth of silver scattered through each load, and we could hear the voice of the driver from far up above and the tinkle of the bell as they descended upon us. Sometimes they made way for us or halted timidly with curious, patient eyes, and sometimes they shouldered us promptly backward into three feet of snow. It was a lonely, impressive journey, and the wonderful beauty and silence of the mountain made words impertinent. And, again, we would come upon a solitary prospector tapping at the great rock in front of him, and only stopping to dip his hot face and blistered hands into the snow about him, before he began to drive the steel bar again with the help which hope gave him. His work but for this ingredient would seem futile, foolish, and impossible. Why, he would ask himself, should I work against this stone safe day after day only to bore a hole in its side as minute as a nail’s point in the front of a house, and a thousand rods, probably, from where the hole should be? And then hope tells him that perhaps the very next stroke will make him a millionaire like Creede, and so he makes the next stroke, and the next, and the next. [Illustration: SHAFT OF A MINE]