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It was the extension of a mine which in earlier days had gophered along the hillside after gold, but now that it was closed down and abandoned to the rats Wilhelmina had taken the tunnel for her own. It ran through the knife-blade ridge as straight as a die, and a trail led up to its mouth; and from the other side, where it broke out into the sun, there was a view of the outer world.
The sides of the gulch were "gophered" with prospect holes, most of them very shallow, with little mounds of dirt beside them, like the graves of dead hopes. Occasionally a deeper hole had picked samples from the ore vein it followed piled near its opening.
After seeing the naked, desolate, scarred-up country around Central City, Cripple Creek, Ouray and other mining localities, I am thankful that no such madness will ever tempt men to despoil the beauties of the region around Estes Park. But if there was no paying gold in the vicinity, there were plenty of prospectors. The slopes above the Parson's ranch were "gophered" all over by them.
One of them, possessed of the prospector's instinct, had gophered a capful of the gravel from off the rim where the plunging tree-trunks had dug through the snow and exposed the outcropping bedrock, and, to satisfy his curiosity, had taken it down to camp for a test.
Either the mine had yielded exceedingly rich streaks and had been, in mining parlance, "gophered," or else the management had been as foolish as ever handled a property. In the assay-house, where the furnaces were dust-covered, the scale case black with grime, and the floor littered with refuse crucibles, cupels, mufflers, and worn buckboards, they discovered a bundle of old tablets.
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