However, Campbell managed somehow to get Byram over to the property on the last day of the option, but up to the eleventh hour he was filled to the brim with nerve-wracking suspense. For hours he had kept his gaze constantly fixed on the sage-fringed road leading out across the broad valley to the east, where was open to the eye a twenty mile sweep of sun-baked waste, looking for that distant dust cloud which might mean that relief for his tired nerves was on the way. Then, late in the afternoon, as the last golden tints lingered along the ragged edges of the mountains, the stage bearing Byram, full four hours late, was sighted far out on the road—a mere speck in a great cloud of dust. There was yet time for speedy action. For a brief ten minutes the two men faced each other—Campbell full of words, Byram deep in meditation. It could hardly be expected that after floundering in a bog of indecision and doubt for so long, that understanding would come to Byram in a flash. But Campbell’s great anxiety in the matter caused him to believe, for the moment, that Byram’s resolutions were still wavering, while his own thoughts whirled like leaves in an autumn blast. Byram’s final words, however, kept Campbell’s spirits from suffering further. I was not there at that particular time, of course, but this minute accounting, the reactions of those men, is as I caught it from Elwood Thomas. “If it hadn’t been such a serious matter with Green,” said Elwood, amid chuckles that sent ripples all over the old miner’s weathered face, “it would have been downright amusing.” The transfer of the Horn Silver claim took place in the shadow of the mountain as the sun dropped out of sight on February 17, 1876. And it was a joyous occasion for the little group of interested men—except, possibly, the two original locators who were now beginning to realize the true worth of that little piece of ground. Fate dealt a mean hand to the locators of the Horn Silver claim. After sinking a shaft thirty feet on ore, Samuel Hawkes and James Ryan bartered away millions on the belief that the ore would not last. And I might say here that the Horn Silver lode, the main ore body, was found by sheer accident. Jimmy Calvering, a young Irishman employed to do the location work, following the custom of the shiftless miner, went away a considerable distance from the outcrop to find “soft ground” in which to dig his ten-foot hole, as required by law. Jimmy was not looking for ore, but in doing that ten foot of work he opened up the main lode. And nowhere else did it come that near the surface. Jimmy was ever after that proclaimed “A man with a great nose for ore.”