Something in Reade’s vigorous way of speaking made Alf Drew obey.  Tom put him over the ground at as good a gait as he judged the cigarette victim would be able to keep up.

Readers of the preceding volumes of this series, and of other, earlier series, need not the slightest introduction to Tom Reade and Harry Hazelton.  Our readers of the “Grammar School Series” know Tom and Harry as two of the members of that famous sextette of schoolboy athletes who, under the leadership of Dick Prescott, were known as Dick & Co.

In the “High School Boys Series,” too, our readers have followed the fortunes of Tom Reade and Harry Hazelton, through all their triumphs on football fields, on baseball diamonds and in all the school sports.

Dick Prescott and Greg Holmes succeeded in winning appointments to the United States military Academy, and their adventures are fully set forth in the “West Point Series.”

Dave Darrin and Dan Dalzell “made” the United States Naval Academy at Annapolis, and what befell them there has been fully set forth in the “Annapolis Series.”

Reade and Harry Hazelton elected to go through life as civil engineers.  In “The Young Engineers in Colorado” has been fully set forth the extraordinary work of these young men at railroad building through the mountains wilds.  In “The Young Engineers in Arizona” we have followed Tom and Harry through even more startling adventures, and have seen how they handled even greater problems in engineering.

Up to date the careers of these two bright young men had not been humdrum ones.  The surroundings in which their professional lives had been passed had been such as to supply them with far more startling adventures than either young man had ever looked for.

And now they were in Nevada, the state famous for its gold and silver mines.  Yet they had come ere solely in search of a few weeks of rest.  Rest?  There was anything but rest immediately ahead of the young engineers, but the curtain had not been lifted.

Immediately after the completion of their great work in Arizona, Tom Reade and Harry Hazelton had gone back east to the good old home town of Gridley.  While there they had encountered Dick Prescott and Greg Holmes, their old school chums, at that time cadets at the United States Military Academy.  The doings of the four old chums at that time in Gridley are set forth fully in “Dick Prescott’s Third Year At West Point.”

During the weeks spent East, Tom and Harry had taken almost their first steps in the study of metallurgy.  They had succeed in mastering the comparatively simple art of assaying gold and silver.

So now, with the summer past, we find our young engineers out in Nevada, taking a little more rest just because no new engineering task of sufficient importance had presented itself.

“If we’re going to be engineers out West, though, Harry, we simply must know a good deal about assaying precious metals,” Tom had declared.