Seth walked back into the new tunnel the women had been digging and looked it over. He admitted he was not a mining engineer and he only had rudimentary knowledge of techniques. Most of what he did know was picked up on the internet before he came to Colorado or what he had seen in the old shafts.
Seth decided they needed to shore up some of the tunnel near the rock fall in the new shaft. He and the women spent several hours cutting and placing the supports. Finally after a lot of talking he agreed to let them clean up the area they had been working in. Their new tunnel was following the new vein of gold and rising slightly as the vein rose in the mountain. The new vein was becoming noticeably narrower and seemed to contain less ore than it had near the old main shaft.
In among their other work the women continued working in the mine. Seth worked there some also on his days off and some evenings. By the time the spring rolled around vein had played out in the direction they were moving. They had a large pile of gold bearing quartz waiting on Seth to finish cleaning and smelt down. He had not melted much during the winter and they had not run any of the dust and dirt through the sluice to clean the small chunks of dust from it.
The women had spent some of the winter working on the old store building when the days were warm enough. They had replaced many of the interior boards that needed it including all the bad ones in the floor. They had drawn up plans for renovating it into a small house for the three to live in. Seth had agreed to add a large bedroom, master bath and closet onto it. They were going to use the old part of the building for the kitchen, dining and living area. The old part of the building was 24X30 feet. The addition would be 16X28 feet. They were going to build a covered porch on the east and south of the building to mate up with the one already on the west. When all was completed they would have a very nice little home of a little less than 1200 square feet. They even made plans for adding a couple of extra rooms for if and/or when they had children.
They had decided to make the addition match the old building. Seth would use the dozer to pull trees he had cut back to the town and they would true them up with the small saw in the shop. They were going to build the addition out of logs as was the old part of the building. They would then insulate on the inside with Styrofoam like they had the office then cover it with paneling.
Seth made sure the women knew the job was going to be a long slow one. He had no intention of going into debt to build the addition. Of course with all the gold he suspected he already had more than enough money.
As the spring progressed they prepared the ground for their large garden and planted it. Seth also began working on the ore they had stockpiled smelting it down into the same size bars they had made the year before. By early June Seth was done smelting the ore. To his surprise he had 57 small bars. If they contained the same amount of gold as before they had mined 72.2299 ounces of gold. At current prices that would come to about $117,000.00. They would not be rich by any means but to them that was wealth beyond anything they had ever dreamed of.
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