ide in the midst of the group.
Then they trotted on, soon catching up with the jogging pack-train.

What a strange ride that was for Joan! The slope resembled a magnified
ant-hill with a horde of frantic ants in action. As she drew closer she
saw these ants were men, digging for gold. Those near at hand could be
plainly seen--rough, ragged, bearded men and smooth-faced boys. Farther
on and up the slope, along the waterways and ravines, were miners so
close they seemed almost to interfere with one another. The creek
bottom was alive with busy, silent, violent men, bending over the water,
washing and shaking and paddling, all desperately intent upon something.
They had not time to look up. They were ragged, unkempt, barearmed and
bare-legged, every last one of them with back bent. For a mile or more
Kells's party trotted through this part of the diggings, and everywhere,
on rocky bench and gravel bar and gray slope, were holes with men
picking and shoveling in them. Some were deep and some were shallow;
some long trenches and others mere pits. If all of these prospectors
were finding gold, then gold was everywhere. And presently Joan did not
need to have Kells tell her that all of these diggers were finding dust.
How silent they were--how tense! They were not mechanical. It was a soul
that drove them. Joan had seen many men dig for gold, and find a little
now and then, but she had never seen men dig when they knew they were
going to strike gold. That made the strange difference.

Joan calculated she must have seen a thousand miners in less than two
miles of the gulch, and then she could not see up the draws and washes
that intersected the slope, and she could not see beyond the camp.

But it was not a camp which she was entering; it was a tent-walled
town, a city of squat log cabins, a long, motley, checkered jumble of
structures thrown up and together in mad haste. The wide road split it
in the middle and seemed a stream of color and life. Joan rode
between two lines of horses, burros, oxen, mules, packs and loads and
canvas-domed wagons and gaudy vehicles resembling gipsy caravans. The
street was as busy as a beehive and as noisy as a bedlam. The sidewalks
were rough-hewn planks and they rattled under the tread of booted men.
There were tents on the ground and tents on floors and tents on log
walls. And farther on began the lines of cabins-stores and shops and
saloons--and then a great, square, flat structure with a fl