noon
It was rich in silver . Somewhere , then , between him and the mountain top was the parent stock from which this precious fragment had been broken . The sun beat hotly upon him as it had on other days through all the hard years when certainty , after all , was nothing more than a temperamental faith . All day he climbed and searched methodically , stopping at noon to eat with an appetite unaffected by his prospect . At sunset he would have stopped for the day , camping on the spot . He looked above to estimate the ground he could cover on the morrow . Almost in front of him , a few yards up the mountainside , he looked squarely at the mother of his float : a huge boulder of projecting silicate .