n dog for a long chase,'" he said.

"How are cattle?" inquired Keith.

The old fellow turned his eyes on him with a keen look.

"Cattle's tolerable. I been buyin' a considerable number up toward
Gumbolt, where you're goin'. I may get you to look after 'em some day,"
he chuckled.

Gordon wrote to Dave Dennison that he was going to Gumbolt and would
look out for him. A little later he learned that the boy had already
gone there.

The means of reaching Gumbolt from Eden, the terminus of the railroad
which Wickersham & Company were building, was still the stage, a
survivor of the old-time mountain coach, which had outlasted all the
manifold chances and changes of fortune.

Happily for Keith, he had been obliged, though it was raining, to take
the outside seat by the driver, old Tim Gilsey, to whom he recalled
himself, and by his coolness at "Hellstreak Hill," where the road
climbed over the shoulder of the mountain along a sheer cliff, and
suddenly dropped to the river below, a point where old Gilsey was wont
to display his skill as a driver and try the nerves of passengers, he
made the old man his friend for life.

When the stage began to ascend the next hill, the old driver actually
unbent so far as to give an account of a "hold-up" that had occurred at
that point not long before, "all along of the durned railroad them
Yankees was bringin' into the country," to which he laid most of the
evils of the time. "For when you run a stage you know who you got with
you," declared Mr. Gilsey; "but when you run a railroad you dunno
who you got."

"Well, tell me about the time you were held up."

"Didn't nobody hold me up," sniffed Mr. Gilsey. "If I had been goin' to
stop I wouldn't 'a' started. It was a dom fool they put up here when I
was down with rheumatiz. Since then they let me pick my substitute.

"Well," he said, as a few lights twinkled below them, "there she is.
Some pretty tough characters there, too. But you ain't goin' to have no
trouble with 'em. All you got to do is to put the curb on 'em onct."

As Keith looked about him in Gumbolt, the morning after his arrival, he
found that his new home was only a rude mining-camp, raw and rugged; a
few rows of frame houses, beginning to be supplanted by hasty brick
structures, stretched up the hills on the sides of unpaved roads, dusty
in dry weather and bottomless in wet. Yet it was, for its size, already
one of the most cosmopolitan places in the country. Of course,