od, but it's not to be sneezed at,
either. I think I'll make me a rocker. I've sampled this bend quite a
lot, and I don't think I can do any better than fly at this while the
water stays low."

"I can help, can't I?" she said eagerly.

"Sure," he smiled. "You help a lot, little person, just sitting around
keeping me company."

"But I want to work," she declared. "I've sat around now till I'm
getting the fidgets."

"All right; I'll give you a job," he returned good-naturedly.
"Meantime, let's eat that lunch you packed up here."

In a branch of the creek which flowed down through the basin. Bill had
found plentiful colors as soon as the first big run-off of water had
fallen. He had followed upstream painstakingly, panning colors always,
and now and then a few grains of coarse gold to encourage him in the
quest. The loss of their horses precluded ranging far afield to that
other glacial stream which he had worked with Whitey Lewis when he was
a free lance in the North. He was close to his base of supplies, and
he had made wages--with always the prospector's lure of a rich strike
on the next bar.

And now, with May well advanced, he had found definite indications of
good pay dirt. The creek swung in a hairpin curve, and in the neck
between the two sides of the loop the gold was sifted through wash
gravel and black sand, piled there by God only knew how many centuries
of glacial drift and flood. But it was there. He had taken panfuls at
random over the bar, and uniformly it gave up coarse gold. With a
rocker he stood a fair chance of big money before the June rise.

"In the morning," said he, when lunch was over, "I'll bring along the
ax and some nails and a shovel, and get busy."

That night they trudged down to the cabin in high spirits. Bill had
washed out enough during the afternoon to make a respectable showing on
Hazel's outspread handkerchief. And Hazel was in a gleeful mood over
the fact that she had unearthed a big nugget by herself. Beginner's
luck, Bill said teasingly, but that did not diminish her elation. The
old, adventurous glamour, which the long winter and moods of depression
had worn threadbare, began to cast its pleasant spell over her again.
The fascination of the gold hunt gripped her. Not for the stuff
itself, but for what it would get. She wondered if the men who dared
the impassive solitudes of the North for weary, lonesome years saw in
every morsel of the gold they found a