cal, experienced man
accustomed to coping with the emergencies which arise when working far
from transportation facilities.

Once this was settled there was nothing more for Bruce to do in the
city and a great deal to be done upon the river, so he bade good-bye to
Jennings and left immediately.

On the journey from the Pacific coast to Spokane the gritting of the
car-wheels was a song of success, of achievement. Bruce felt himself
alive to the finger-tips with the joy of at last being busy at something
worth while. He looked back upon the times when he had thought himself
happy with profound pity for his ignorance.

When he had stretched himself at night on his mattress of pine-boughs
with his head on the bear-grass pillow watching through the cabin window
the moon rise out of the "draw" where Big Squaw creek headed, he had
thought that he was happy. When he had found a bit of float that
"panned," a ledge that held possibilities, or the yellow flakes had
shown up thicker than usual in the day's clean-up he had called this
satisfaction, the momentary exhilaration, happiness. When he had landed
a battling "red-side" after a struggle and later thrust his fork through
the crisp, brown skin into its steaming pink flesh he had characterized
that animal contentment such as any clod might have, as happiness. Poor
fool, he told himself now, he had not known the meaning of the word.

His day dreams had taken on a different color. His goal was always
before him and this goal was represented by the hour when the machinery
in the power and pump houses was running smoothly, when a head of water
was flowing through the flume and sluice-boxes and the scrapers were
handling 1000 cubic yards a day. As he stared through the window at the
flying landscape he saw, not the orchards and wheat fields of the great
state of Washington, but quicksilver lying thick with amalgam behind
the riffles and the scales sagging with precious, yellow, honey-combed
chunks of gold still hot from the retort.

Sometimes he found himself anticipating the moment when he should be
telegraphing the amount of the clean-up to Helen Dunbar, to Harrah, and
to Harrah's good-naturedly pessimistic friends. Bruce ransacked his
brain for somebody in the world to envy, but there was no one.

He had gone directly to the river from the East, taking a surveyor with
him, and as soon as his application for the water-right in Big Squaw
creek had been granted he got a crew to