detail of which Casey was secretly rather
proud. A box of grub, a smoked coffee pot and dirty breakfast dishes
left beside a dead campfire establishes evidence, admissible before any
jury, that the owner means to return.

Casey went over and cranked the Ford, grimly determined to make the
coffee pot lie for him if necessary. He backed the car down the draw a
good seventy-five yards, to where a wrinkle in the bank hid him from
the breakfast camp. He stopped there and left the engine running while
he straddled out over the side and went forward to the dip of the front
fender to see if the Ford were still visible to Mack Nolan. He was
glad to find that by crouching and sighting across the fender he could
just see the campfire and the top of Nolan's hat beyond it. The man
need only lift his head off his arm to see that the Ford was standing
just around the turn of the draw.

"The corner was never yet so tight that Casey Ryan couldn't find a
crack somewhere to crawl through," he told himself vaingloriously. "An'
I hope to thunder the feller sleeps long an' sleeps solid!"

For fifteen minutes the mind of Casey Ryan was at ease. He had found a
shovel in the car, placed conveniently at the side where it could be
used for just such an emergency as this. For fifteen minutes he had
been using that shovel in a shelving bank of loose gravel just under an
outcropping of rhyolite a rod or so behind the car and well out of
sight of Nolan.

He was beginning to consider his excavation almost deep enough to bury
two ten-gallon kegs and forty bottles of whisky, when the shadow of a
head and shoulders fell across the hole. Casey did not lift the dirt
and rocks he had on his shovel. He froze to a tense quiet, goggling at
the shadow.

"What are yuh doing, Casey? Trying to outdig a badger?" Mack Nolan's
chuckle was friendliness itself.

Casey's head snapped around so that he could cock an eye up at Nolan.
He grinned mechanically. "Naw. Picked up a rich-lookin' piece uh
float. Thought I'd just see if it didn't mebby come from this ledge."

Mack Nolan stepped forward interestedly and looked at the ledge.

"Where's the piece you found?" he very naturally inquired. "The
formation just here wouldn't lead me to expect gold-bearing rock; but
of course, anything is possible with gold. Let's have a look at the
specimen."

Casey had once tried to bluff a stranger with two deuces and a pair of
fives, and two full stacks of blue