‘Yes, talk by fellers that didn’t know a quartz lode from a load o’ bricks or a stone wall.  Get out, I’m sleepy.’

‘Show him the specimen,’ said Dick.

Harry handed it over.

‘The boy says this is from his show.  How’s that?’ he said.

McKnight took the stone indifferently, cast his eye over it, and then sat up with a jerk.  He moistened the stone here and there, glared again in a strained silence, and one leg shot out of bed.  He weighed the specimen in his hand, and the second leg followed.  Then McKnight fell to dressing himself; he literally jumped into his clothes, and as he buttoned his vest all askew, he gasped: 

‘Hold on there—­I’ll be with you in two twos!’

‘Wouldn’t break my neck about it, old man,’ said Harry sarcastically, ‘p’raps the boy made that specimen out of a door knob an’ a bit of brick.’

‘Did he, but—­That’s just the same class o’ stone as the specimen Henderson found in the back paddock twelve years ago, that sent everyone daft after a reef there.  Come on.’

McKnight was now much the most eager of the three, and led the way at a great pace to Peterson’s house.  Peterson was more easily convinced, and in a few minutes the four joined Downy at Mrs. Hardy’s.  The detective had borrowed a coil of rope, the necessary tools were provided, and the party set off.  The five no sooner appeared on the flat with their burdens than they were sighted by many of the people of Waddy, now eagerly on the lookout for adventure, and before they reached the bush they had quite a mob at their heels, fed by a thin stream of men, women, and children hurrying to witness the newest development of Waddy’s latest and greatest affair.

Dick led the men into the Gaol Quarry, and at the spring turned and pointed the way through the scrub growth under which he and his mates always crawled to get at the opening leading into the Mount of Gold.

‘In there,’ he said, ‘agin the wall.’

Harry and McKnight broke a passage through the saplings and ti-tree.

‘’Tween them two rocks,’ said Dick; ‘low down under the fern.’

‘Yes,’ cried Harry, ‘here we are!  Let’s have the hammer, Peterson.’

Harry broke away projecting pieces of stone, widening the aperture, and Dick and the detective joined them at the opening.

‘I’ll go first,’ said the boy.  ’I can go down the ladder we made, but it mightn’t bear a man.’

Dick went below and lit a couple of candles.  Nothing had been touched in the drive, and he peeped into the shaft and saw that the loose dirt there was as he left it.  Harry joined him in a few minutes and McKnight followed.  The men came down on the boys’ curious ladder, but with a rope about their waists, paid out from above.  Downy was the last to go below, Peterson remaining on the surface to keep the crowd back from the entrance.

McKnight seized a candle, crawled to the extremity of Dick’s diminishing drive, and examined the place curiously.