Near the water they had also found a promising outcropping of silver-bearing quartz.
Barney's blowpipe had this very day shown them silver in castle-building quantities.
Just at this moment, however, they were not thinking of mines.

They were eyeing a round hole in the coffeepot from which a brown rivulet ran spitting into the blackening coals.
Casey was the more venturesome.

He raised himself to see if he could discover where the bullet had come from, and very nearly met the fate of the coffeepot.

He felt the wind of a second bullet that spatted against a boulder near Barney.

Barney burrowed deeper into his covert.
Casey went down on all fours and crawled laboriously toward a concealing bank covered thick with brush.