gh on its back was a high-horned Mexican saddle, scarred
and discolored by long usage.

The man brought up the rear. He threw off pack and saddle, with an eye
to camp location, and gave the animals their freedom to graze. He
unpacked his food and got out frying-pan and coffee-pot. He gathered an
armful of dry wood, and with a few stones made a place for his fire.

"My!" he said, "but I've got an appetite. I could scoff iron-filings an'
horseshoe nails an' thank you kindly, ma'am, for a second helpin'."

He straightened up, and, while he reached for matches in the pocket of
his overalls, his eyes traveled across the pool to the side-hill. His
fingers had clutched the match-box, but they relaxed their hold and the
hand came out empty. The man wavered perceptibly. He looked at his
preparations for cooking and he looked at the hill.

"Guess I'll take another whack at her," he concluded, starting to cross
the stream.

"They ain't no sense in it, I know," he mumbled apologetically. "But
keepin' grub back an hour ain't go in' to hurt none, I reckon."

A few feet back from his first line of test-pans he started a second
line. The sun dropped down the western sky, the shadows lengthened, but
the man worked on. He began a third line of test-pans. He was
cross-cutting the hillside, line by line, as he ascended. The center of
each line produced the richest pans, while the ends came where no colors
showed in the pan. And as he ascended the hillside the lines grew
perceptibly shorter. The regularity with which their length diminished
served to indicate that somewhere up the slope the last line would be so
short as to have scarcely length at all, and that beyond could come
only a point. The design was growing into an inverted "V." The
converging sides of this "V" marked the boundaries of the gold-bearing
dirt.

The apex of the "V" was evidently the man's goal. Often he ran his eye
along the converging sides and on up the hill, trying to divine the
apex, the point where the gold-bearing dirt must cease. Here resided
"Mr. Pocket"--for so the man familiarly addressed the imaginary point
above him on the slope, crying out:

"Come down out o' that, Mr. Pocket! Be right smart an' agreeable, an'
come down!"

"All right," he would add later, in a voice resigned to determination.
"All right, Mr. Pocket. It's plain to me I got to come right up an'
snatch you out bald-headed. An' I'll do it! I'll do it!" he would
threaten still later.