a mine? Next day he wrote another letter somewhere
too--but I didn't find out who it was to. If I'd had any gumption I'd
got ahold of 'em both. The point is--I'm convinced it's worth a trip, at
least."

"I should say it was worth a trip," Ray agreed. "And a fast one, too.
There might be some competition--"

"There won't be a rush, if that's what you mean. Everybody knows it's a
pocket country, and the men in this town wouldn't any more get excited
about the Yuga River--"

"True enough--but that Ezra Melville will be showin' up one of these
days. We want to be settin' pretty when he comes."

"You've got the idea. It ought to be the easiest job we ever did. It's
my idea he had his claim all laid out, monuments up and everything, and
was on his way down to Bradleyburg to record it when he died. He just
went out before he could make the rest of the trip. All we'll have to do
is go up there, locate in his cabin, and sit tight."

"Wait just a second." Ray was lost in thought. "There's an old cabin up
that way somewhere--along that still place--on the river. It was a
trapping cabin belonging to old Bill Foulks."

"That's true enough--but it likely ain't near his mine. Boys, it's a
clean, open-and-shut job--with absolutely nothing to interfere. If his
brother does come up, he'll find us in possession--and nothing to do but
go back. So to-morrow we'll load up and pack horses and light out."

"Up Poor Man creek, through Spruce Pass--"

"Sure. Then over to the Yuga. Old Hiram was hunting down some kind of a
scent in the vicinity of that old cabin you speak of, last heard of him.
And I wouldn't be surprised, on second thought, if it wasn't his base of
operations."

"All easy enough," Ray agreed. He paused, and a queer, speculative look
came into his wild-beast's eyes. "But what I don't see--how you can
figure all this is going to help me out with Beatrice."

Jeffery Neilson turned in his chair. "You can't, eh? You need
spectacles. Just think a minute--say you had fifty or sixty thousand all
your own--to spend on a wife and buy her clothes and automobiles. Don't
you think that would make you more attractive to the feminine eye?"

At first Ray made no apparent answer. He merely sat staring ahead. But
plainly the words had wakened riot in his imagination. Such a sum meant
_wealth_, the power his ambitious nature had always craved, idleness and
the gratification of all his lusts. He was no stranger to greed, this
degenera