“Well, I begin to feel a good deal more easy.  I guess we’ve really got it.  I remember hearing them tell about the Black Mohawk.”

“I’m free to say that I believe it, and the men all think so too.  They are all old hands at this business.”

“Come Harry, let’s go up and look at it, just for the comfort of it,” said Philip.  They came back in the course of an hour, satisfied and happy.

There was no more sleep for them that night.  They lit their pipes, put a specimen of the coal on the table, and made it a kind of loadstone of thought and conversation.

“Of course,” said Harry, “there will have to be a branch track built, and a ‘switch-back’ up the hill.”

“Yes, there will be no trouble about getting the money for that now.  We could sell-out tomorrow for a handsome sum.  That sort of coal doesn’t go begging within a mile of a rail-road.  I wonder if Mr. Bolton’ would rather sell out or work it?”

“Oh, work it,” says Harry, “probably the whole mountain is coal now you’ve got to it.”

“Possibly it might not be much of a vein after all,” suggested Philip.

“Possibly it is; I’ll bet it’s forty feet thick.  I told you.  I knew the sort of thing as soon as I put my eyes on it.”

Philip’s next thought was to write to his friends and announce their good fortune.  To Mr. Bolton he wrote a short, business letter, as calm as he could make it.  They had found coal of excellent quality, but they could not yet tell with absolute certainty what the vein was.  The prospecting was still going on.  Philip also wrote to Ruth; but though this letter may have glowed, it was not with the heat of burning anthracite.  He needed no artificial heat to warm his pen and kindle his ardor when he sat down to write to Ruth.  But it must be confessed that the words never flowed so easily before, and he ran on for an hour disporting in all the extravagance of his imagination.  When Ruth read it, she doubted if the fellow had not gone out of his senses.  And it was not until she reached the postscript that she discovered the cause of the exhilaration.  “P.  S.—­We have found coal.”

The news couldn’t have come to Mr. Bolton in better time.  He had never been so sorely pressed.  A dozen schemes which he had in hand, any one of which might turn up a fortune, all languished, and each needed just a little more, money to save that which had been invested.  He hadn’t a piece of real estate that was not covered with mortgages, even to the wild tract which Philip was experimenting on, and which had, no marketable value above the incumbrance on it.

He had come home that day early, unusually dejected.

“I am afraid,” he said to his wife, “that we shall have to give up our house.  I don’t care for myself, but for thee and the children.”

“That will be the least of misfortunes,” said Mrs. Bolton, cheerfully, “if thee can clear thyself from debt and anxiety, which is wearing thee out, we can live any where.  Thee knows we were never happier than when we were in a much humbler home.”