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Yet there can be no doubt, that the same capital well employed in these mines would have yielded an immense return: a confidential man of business, a practical miner and assayer, would have been all that was required. Captain Head has described the wonderful load which the "Apires," truly beasts of burden, carry up from the deepest mines.
"I done so, for I knowed there'd be trouble with the outlaws if I didn't. I ain't never been able to get any of that gold to the assayer. They've been watchin' me like buzzards on a limb over some carrion. I don't get out of their sight. "An' now they've finally got me. I've got a little of the gold in my pocket now here it is."
The short November day had now nearly drawn to a close, and after supper the gentlemen adjourned to the office building, where they spent an hour or more around the open fire. Darrell, who was quite wearied with the unusual exertion and excitement of the day, retired early, the superintendent and assayer had gone out on some business at the mill, and Mr. Underwood and Mr.
Buchan would take samples of the ore every week or ten days and walk a distance of twenty-five miles to Saguache, where old man Amos, expert geologist and assayer, would for two dollars and fifty cents make out a clean printed slip with figures in red ink, showing so many ounces of lead, copper, silver and gold to the ton.
Booth, U. S. Assayer, as well as other distinguished authorities, have, after thorough experiment, given to the company certificates of the great richness of the ores already shipped to the east. The annual report of the Sonora Mining Co. is full of interest to the general reader. The Sopori mine is another very valuable property. It is owned by Messrs. Douglass, Aldrich, and another.
A button or globule of perfectly pure gold and silver is left behind, and by weighing it and noting the loss, the assayer knows the proportion of base metal the brick contains. He has to separate the gold from the silver now.
Ida, however, usually kept her deeper thoughts to herself, which Mrs. Weston had seldom done, but she shaped her life by them, and they were wholesome. "Well," he said diffidently, "it was quite a humiliating situation for the old man. He was a person of some consequence once a rather famous assayer and mineralogist and I think he felt it."
"First, we don't want to let on that we've got anything at all on our minds much less a rich mine. After a reasonable time we should make some casual mention of discontent that we've sent off rock to an assayer and not heard from it. Not to say a word would make our conspirators more suspicious; a careless mention of it might make them think our find wasn't such-a-much, after all. Say!
I have sat on an old sleeper, under the thick madronas near the forge, with just a look over the dump on the green world below, and seen the sun lying broad among the wreck, and heard the silence broken only by the tinkling water in the shaft, or a stir of the royal family about the battered palace, and my mind has gone back to the epoch of the Stanleys and the Chapmans, with a grand tutti of pick and drill, hammer and anvil, echoing about the canyon; the assayer hard at it in our dining-room; the carts below on the road, and their cargo of red mineral bounding and thundering down the iron chute.
"It can show those who remember him as he was that Grenfell the assayer and mineralogist can still look round a mineral basin and tell just where the gold should be." Weston was no geologist, but he had seen enough of it to recognize that prospecting is an art.
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