hundred suns of summer, was
scored with now dry water-courses nearly a foot deep. With all his
knowledge and long experience of the mountains even the Padre was
filled with awe at the memory of what he had witnessed.

"Makes you think, Buck, doesn't it?" he said, pointing at a stately
forest giant stretched prone along the edge of the trail, its proud
head biting deeply into the earth, and its vast roots lifting twenty
and more feet into the air. "I was out in the worst of it, too," he
went on thoughtfully. Then he smiled at the recollection of his puny
affairs while the elements had waged their merciless war. "I was
taking a golden fox out of a trap, 'way back there on the side of the
third ridge. While I was doing it the first two crashes came. A
hundred and more yards away two pines, big fellers, guess they were
planted before the flood, were standing out solitary on a big rock
overhanging the valley below. They were there when I first bent over
the trap. When I stood up they were gone--rock and all. It made me
think then. Guess it makes me think more now."

"It surely was a storm," agreed Buck absently.

They reached the open valley, and here the signs were less, so, taking
advantage of the clearing, they set their horses at a fast gallop.
Their way took them skirting the great slope of the hill-base, and
every moment was bearing them on toward the old farm, for that way,
some distance beyond, lay the ford which they must cross to reach the
camp.

Neither seemed inclined for further talk. Buck was looking straight
out ahead in the direction of the farm, and his preoccupation had
given place to a smile of anticipation. The Padre was intent upon the
black slopes of the hill. Farther along, the hill turned away toward
the creek, and the trail bore to the left, passing on the hither side
of a great bluff of woods which stretched right up to the very corrals
of the farm. It was here, too, where the overhang of the suspended
lake came into view, where Yellow Creek poured its swift, shallow
torrent in the shadowed twilight of the single-walled tunnel and the
gold-seekers held their operations in a vain quest of fortune.

They had just come abreast of this point and the Padre was observing
the hill with that never-failing interest with which the scene always
filled him. He believed there was nothing like it in all the world,
and regarded it as a stupendous example of Nature's engineering. But
now, without warning, hi