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It was but two or three days later that the partners, coming from the assay-house to the mess late, discovered a stranger talking to the men outside under the shade of a great clump of tamaracks that nestled at the foot of a slope. They passed in and sat down at their table, wondering who the visitor could be.
He was eager to get to the assay-house and make his first assay of "tailings," refuse from the mill, to discover what percentage of gold they were saving, and, in parlance, "How she would run on mill test."
And the afternoon passed as quickly while he worked over the bucking board a plate used to crush ore for assaying in the assay-house, and watched the gasoline flare and fume in his furnaces to bring the little cupels, with their mass of powdered, weighed, and numbered samples, to a molten state.
The old man's right, I think. This looks like ore to me." Dick hastened back, and assisted while they broke away the looser pieces of green rock, glowing dully, and filled their sample sacks. Three hours later they stood over the scales in the log assay-house above, and congratulated each other. "It'll pay!" Dick declared gleefully. "Not much, but enough to justify going on with the work.
He entered the assay-house like a whipped dog seeking the refuge of its kennel, threw himself on a stool before the bench, leaned his head into his hollowed arms, and groaned as would a stricken warrior of olden days when surrendering to his wounds.
They walked slowly around the plant, Dick pointing out their technical progress as they went, and she still further gained Bill's admiration in the assay-house when she declared that she had a preference for another kind of furnace than they were using. "Why, say, Miss Presby, can you assay?" he burst out. "Assay!" she said.
"Why, I lived in the assay-house at two or three times, and then studied it afterward." "Hey, up there!" a shout came from the roadway below. They turned and went out to the little cindered, littered level in front of the door, and looked down to where, on the roadway a hundred feet below, a man stood at the head of a string of panting burros, and they recognized in him a packer from Goldpan.
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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