e keeper of the cables.

Young Jerry broke off his song at the sound of approaching footsteps. A
tall, blue-shirted man, a rifle across the hollow of his arm, came out
from the gloom of the pine-trees. It was Hall, watchman of the Yellow
Dragon mine, the cables of which spanned the Sacramento a mile farther
up.

"Yello, younker!" was his greeting. "What you doin' here by your
lonesome?"

"Oh, bachin'," Jerry tried to answer unconcernedly, as if it were a very
ordinary sort of thing. "Dad's away, you see."

"Where's he gone?" the man asked.

"San Francisco. Went last night. His brother's dead in the old country,
and he's gone down to see the lawyers. Won't be back till tomorrow
night."

So spoke Jerry, and with pride, because of the responsibility which had
fallen to him of keeping an eye on the property of the Yellow Dream, and
the glorious adventure of living alone on the cliff above the river and
of cooking his own meals.

"Well, take care of yourself," Hall said, "and don't monkey with the
cables. I'm goin' to see if I can pick up a deer in the Cripple Cow
Canon."

"It's goin' to rain, I think," Jerry said, with mature deliberation.

"And it's little I mind a wettin'," Hall laughed, as he strode away
among the trees.

Jerry's prediction concerning rain was more than fulfilled. By ten
o'clock the pines were swaying and moaning, the cabin windows rattling,
and the rain driving by in fierce squalls. At half past eleven he
kindled a fire, and promptly at the stroke of twelve sat down to his
dinner.

No out-of-doors for him that day, he decided, when he had washed the few
dishes and put them neatly away; and he wondered how wet Hall was and
whether he had succeeded in picking up a deer.

At one o'clock there came a knock at the door, and when he opened it a
man and a woman staggered in on the breast of a great gust of wind. They
were Mr. and Mrs. Spillane, ranchers, who lived in a lonely valley a
dozen miles back from the river.

"Where's Hall?" was Spillane's opening speech, and he spoke sharply and
quickly.

Jerry noted that he was nervous and abrupt in his movements, and that
Mrs. Spillane seemed laboring under some strong anxiety. She was a thin,
washed-out, worked-out woman, whose life of dreary and unending toil had
stamped itself harshly upon her face. It was the same life that had
bowed her husband's shoulders and gnarled his hands and turned his hair
to a dry and dusty gray.

"He's gone hunt