MURPHY HAS A HUMOROUS MOOD

Though Fred and the professor shouldered pick and shovel at sunrise every morning and laid them down thankfully at dusk every night, they could not hope to work out the assessment upon eight mining claims in a year.  The professor was not a success as a pick-and-shovel man, though he did his best.  He acquired a row of callouses on each hand and a chronic ache in his back, but beyond that he did not accomplish very much.  Fred was really the brawn of the undertaking, and in a practical way he was the brains also.  Fred saw at once that the task required more muscle than he and the professor could furnish, so he hired a couple of men and set them to work on the claims of the speculators.

Two little old Irishmen, these were; men who had dried down to pure muscle and bone as to their bodies, and to pure mining craft and tenacious memory for the details of their narrow lives as to brains.  The mountains produce such men.  In the barren plains country they would be called desert rats, but in the mountains they are called prospectors.

They set up their own camp half a mile down the creek, so that Kate and Marion seldom saw them.  They did their own cooking and divided their work to suit themselves, and they did not charge as much for their labor as Fred charged the claim-owners for the work, so Fred considered that he had done very well in hiring them.  He could turn his attention to his own claim and the claims of Marion and Kate, and let the professor peck away at a hole in the hillside where he vaguely hoped to find gold.  Why not?  People did, in these mountains.  Why, nuggets of gold had been picked up in the main street of Quincy, so they told him.  One man in town had solemnly assured him that all these hills were “lousy with gold”; and while the professor did not like the phrase, he did like the heartening assurance it bore to his wistful heart, and he began examining his twenty-acre claim with a new interest.  Surely the early-day miners had not gleaned all the gold!  Why, nearly every time he talked with any of the natives he heard of fresh strikes.  Old prospectors like Murphy and Mike were always coming in town for supplies and then hurrying back to far canyons where they fully expected to become rich.

The professor got a book on mineralogy and read it faithfully.  Certain points which he was not sure that he understood he memorized and meant to ask Murphy, who had a memory like a trap and had mined from Mexico to Alaska and from Montana to the sea.

Murphy poised his shovel, since he happened to be working, twinkled his eyes at the professor through thick, silver-rimmed glasses, and demanded:  “For why do ye be readin’ a buke about it?  For why don’t ye get down wit yer pick, man, and see what’s in the ground?  My gorry, I been minin’ now for forty-wan year, ever sence I come from the auld country, an’ I never read no buke t’ see what I had in me claim.