raced his great
shoulders against one of the bulging packs to assist a sweating,
straining animal. After one of these perilous tracts he stopped beside
the burros, pushed the stained white Stetson to the back of his head,
exposing a white forehead which had been protected from the sun, and
ran the sleeve of his blue-flannel shirt across his face from brow to
chin to wipe away the moisture.

"Hell's got no worse roads than this!" he exclaimed. "Next time
anybody talks me into takin' a cut-off over a spring trail to save a
day and a half's time, him and me'll have an argument!"

Ahead, and at the moment inspecting a knot in a diamond hitch, the
other man grinned, then straightened up, and, shading his eyes from
the sun with his hat, looked off into the distance. He was younger
than his partner, whose hair was grizzled to a badger gray, but no
less determined and self-reliant in appearance. He did not look his
thirty years, while the other man looked more than his forty-eight.

"Well, Bill," he said slowly, "it seems to me if we can get through at
all we've saved a day and a half. By the way, come up here."

The grizzled prospector walked up until he stood abreast, and from the
little rise stared ahead.

"Isn't that it?" asked the younger man. "Over there--through the gap;
just down below that spike with a snow cap." He stretched out a long,
muscular arm, and his companion edged up to it and sighted along its
length and over the index finger as if it were the barrel of a rifle,
and stared, scowling, at the distant maze of mountain and sky that
seemed upended from the green of the forests below.

"Say, I believe you're right, Dick!" he exclaimed. "I believe you are.
Let's hustle along to the top of this divide, and then we'll know for
sure."

They resumed their progress, to halt at the top, where there was
abruptly opened below them a far-flung panorama of white and gray and
purple, stretched out in prodigality from sky line to sky line.

"Well, there she is, Dick," asserted the elder man. "That yellow,
cross-shaped mark up there on the side of the peak. I kept tellin' you
to keep patient and we'd get there after a while."

His partner did not reply to the inconsistency of this argument, but
stood looking at the landmark as if dreaming of all it represented.

"That is it, undoubtedly," he said, as if to himself. "The Croix d'Or.
I suppose that's why the old Frenchman who located the mine in the
first place gave