too much for him," one of the men declared, when
the saloon-keeper came in. "Say, hadn't you better help us heave him
in some place where he can sleep, unless you'd prefer to keep him as an
advertisement?"

Black was stored away with some difficulty, and two hours later he was
wheeled on a baggage-truck into the station, where half the inhabitants
of the settlement assembled to see him off. The big cars were already
clanging down the track, when a tall man riding a lathered horse
appeared among the scattered pines on the shoulder of the hill above
the settlement. A bystander commented:

"Thurston's foreman coming round for some of his packages. As usual
he's in an almighty hurry. That place is 'most as steep as a roof, and
he's coming down it at a gallop."

The prospectors glanced at each other, and one of them said, "Lend me a
hand, somebody, to heave our sick partner aboard."

Black was unceremoniously deposited upon the platform of the nearest
car, where he sat blinking vacantly at the assembly, while the
conductor, leaning out from the door of the baggage-car, looked back
towards the rider who was clattering through a dust cloud down the
street, as he asked: "Anybody else besides the tired man? Is that
fellow yonder coming?"

"No," answered the prospector. "He's only wanting one of those cases
you've just dumped out. Likes to fancy his time's precious. I know
him."

The conductor waved his hand, the big bell clanged, and the train had
just rolled with a rattle over a trestle ahead, when Mattawa Tom,
grimed with thick red dust, flung himself down beside the agent's
office.

"Has a dark-faced thief in a plug hat with two holes in the top of it,
gone out on the cars?" he shouted, and the spectators admitted that
such a person boarded the train.

"Why didn't you come in two minutes earlier, Tom?" one of them
inquired. "He lit out with two strangers. Has he been stealing
something?"

"He's been doing worse, and I'd have been in on time, but that I
stopped ten minutes to help freighter Louis cut loose the two live oxen
left him," said the foreman, breathlessly. "One wheel came off his
wagon going down the Clearwater Trail, and the whole blame outfit
pitched over into a ravine. There's several thousand dollars' worth of
our boring machines smashed up, and Louis, who has pretty well split
his head, is cussing the man who took the cotter out of his wheel hub."

The two prospectors were heartily tir