Fairchild led the way to the chamber, seized a hammer and took his place.
"There 's two-hundred-dollar ore back of this foot wall if we can break in and start a new stope," he announced.

"It takes a six-foot hole to reach it, and we can have the whole story by morning.

Let's go!" Along the great length of the foot wall, extending all the distance of the big chamber, the men began their work, five men to the drills and as many to the sledges, as they started their double-jacking.

Hour after hour the clanging of steel against steel sounded in the big underground room, as the drills bit deeper and deeper into the hard formation of the foot wall, driving steadily forward until their contact should have a different sound, and the muggy scrapings bear a darker hue than that of mere wall-rock.

Hour after hour passed, while the drill-turners took their places with the sledges, and the sledgers went to the drills--the turnabout system of "double-jacking"-- with Fairchild, the eleventh man, filling in along the line as an extra sledger, that the miners might be the more relieved in their strenuous, frenzied work.