em worth while to stop here--for
awhile, at least.

They cleaned out the cabin and took possession of it, and the next time
they went to town Cash made cautious inquiries about the place. It was,
he learned, an old abandoned claim. Abandoned chiefly because the old
miner who had lived there died one day, and left behind him all the
marks of having died from starvation, mostly. A cursory examination of
his few belongings had revealed much want, but no gold save a little
coarse dust in a small bottle.

"About enough to fill a rifle ca'tridge," detailed the teller of the
tale. "He'd pecked around that draw for two, three year mebby. Never
showed no gold much, for all the time he spent there. Trapped some in
winter--coyotes and bobcats and skunks, mostly. Kinda off in the upper
story, old Nelson was. I guess he just stayed there because he happened
to light there and didn't have gumption enough to git out. Hills is full
of old fellers like him. They live off to the'rselves, and peck around
and git a pocket now and then that keeps 'm in grub and tobacco. If you
want to use the cabin, I guess nobody's goin' to care. Nelson never had
any folks, that anybody knows of. Nobody ever bothered about takin' up
the claim after he cashed in, either. Didn't seem worth nothin' much.
Went back to the gov'ment."

"Trapped, you say. Any game around there now?"

"Oh, shore! Game everywhere in these hills, from weasels up to bear and
mountain lion. If you want to trap, that's as good a place as any, I
guess."

So Cash and Bud sold the burros and bought traps and more supplies, and
two window sashes and a crosscut saw and some wedges and a double-bitted
axe, and settled down in Nelson Flat to find what old Dame Fortune had
tucked away in this little side pocket and forgotten.

CHAPTER NINE. THE BITE OF MEMORY

The heavy boom of a dynamite blast rolled across the fiat to the hills
that flung it back in a tardy echo like a spent ball of sound. A blob of
blue smoke curled out of a hole the size of a hogshead in a steep bank
overhung with alders. Outside, the wind caught the smoke and carried
streamers of it away to play with. A startled bluejay, on a limb high up
on the bank, lifted his slaty crest and teetered forward, clinging with
his toe nails to the branch while he scolded down at the men who had
scared him so. A rattle of clods and small rocks fell from their high
flight into the sweet air of a mountain sunset.

"Good executio