What Murphy thought of it Murphy was succinctly expressing just then to Mike, with an upward twinkle of his thick, convex glasses, and a contemptuous fling of his shovelful of dirt up over the rim of the hole.

“My gorry, I think this mine we’re workin’ on was located by the bake,” he chuckled.  “Fer if not that, will ye tell me why else they want ’er opened up?  There’s as much gold here as I’ve got in me pocket, an’ not a dom bit more.”

“Well, that man I knowed in Minnesota, he tuk a crooked sthick,” gobbled Mike, whose speech, as well as his mind had been driven askew by the railroad tie; but Murphy impatiently shut him up again.

“A-ah, an’ that’s about as much as ye iver did know, I’m thinkin’, le’s have no more av yer crooked sthick.  Hand me down that other pick, fer this wan is no sharper than me foot.”

He worked steadily after that, flinging up the moist soil with an asperated “a-ah” that punctuated regularly each heave of his shoulder muscles.  In a little he climbed out and helped Mike rig a windlass over the hole.  Mike pottered a good deal, and stood often staring vacantly, studying the next detail of their work.  When he was not using them, his hands drooped helplessly at his sides, a sign of mental slackness never to be mistaken.  He was willing, and what Murphy told him to do he did.  But it was Murphy who did the hard work, who planned for them both.

Presently Mike went bowlegging to camp to start their dinner, and Murphy finished spiking the windlass to the platform on which it rested.  He still whispered a sibilant “a-ah!” with every blow of the hammer, and the perspiration trickled down his seamed temples in little rivulets to his chin that looked smaller and weaker than it should because he had lost so many of his teeth and had a habit of pinching his lower jaw up against his upper.

The professor came back with his sample of rock—­with a pocketful of samples—­just as Murphy had finished and was wiping his thick glasses on a soiled, blue calico handkerchief with large white polka-dots on the border and little white polka-dots in the middle.  He turned toward the professor inquiringly, warned by the scrunching footsteps that some one approached.  But he was blind as a bat—­so he declared—­without his glasses, so he finished polishing them and placed them again before his bleared, powder-burned eyes before he knew who was coming.

“An’ it’s you back already,” he greeted, in his soft Irish voice, that tilted up at the end of every sentence, so that, without knowing what words he spoke, one would think he was asking question after question and never making a statement at all.  “An’ what have ye dug outy yer buke now?”

“No, by George, I dug this out of the ground,” the professor declared, going forward eagerly.  “I want you to tell me frankly just what you think of it.”

“An’ I will do that—­though it’s many the fight I’ve been in because of speakin’ me mind,” Murphy stated, grinning a little.  “An’ now le’s see what ye got there.  My gorry, I’ve been thinkin’ they’re all av thim buke mines that ye have here,” he bantered, peering into the professor’s face, before he took the largest piece of rock and turned it over critically in his hands.  In a minute he handed it back with a quizzical glance.