tage the rapids as they come."

"Oh, Bill!" she came and leaned her head against him contritely. "Our
poor ponies! And it was all my carelessness."

"Never mind, hon," he comforted. "They blinked out without suffering.
And we'll make it like a charm. Be game--it'll soon be spring."

As if in verification of his words, with the last breath of that
howling storm came a sudden softening of the atmosphere. The sharp
teeth of the frost became swiftly blunted, and the sun, swinging daily
in a wider arc, brought the battery of his rays into effective play on
the mountainsides. The drifts lessened, shrunk, became moisture
sodden. For ten days or more the gradual thaw increased. Then a
lusty-lunged chinook wind came booming up along the Klappan Range, and
stripped it to a bare, steaming heap. Overhead whistled the first
flight of the wild goose, bound for the nesting grounds. Night and day
the roar of a dozen cataracts droned on all sides of the basin, as the
melting snow poured down in the annual spring flood.

By April the twentieth the abdication of Jack Frost was complete. A
kindlier despot ruled the land, and Bill Wagstaff began to talk of gold.

CHAPTER XXII

THE STRIKE

". . . that precious yellow metal sought by men
In regions desolate.
Pursued in patient hope or furious toil;
Breeder of discord, wars, and murderous hate;
The victor's spoil."

So Hazel quoted, leaning over her husband's shoulder. In the bottom of
his pan, shining among a film of black sand, lay half a dozen bright
specks, varying from pin-point size to the bigness of a grain of wheat.

"That's the stuff," Bill murmured. "Only it seems rather far-fetched
for your poet to blame inanimate matter for the cussedness of humanity
in general. I suppose, though, he thought he was striking a highly
dramatic note. Anyway, it looks as if we'd struck it pretty fair.
It's time, too--the June rise will hit us like a whirlwind one of these
days."

"About what is the value of those little pieces?" Hazel asked.

"Oh, fifty or sixty cents," he answered. "Not much by itself. But it
seems to be uniform over the bar--and I can wash a good many pans in a
day's work."

"I should think so," she remarked. "It didn't take you ten minutes to
do that one."

"Whitey Lewis and I took out over two hundred dollars a day on that
other creek last spring--no, a year last spring, it was," he observed
reminiscently. "This isn't as go