sed when he was
a boy. His heart was a big soft one; and though he could face anything
in the way of work or fighting that a man dare do, and do two men's
share very like, yet his tears, mother said, laid very near his eyes,
and till he was a grown man they used to pump up on all sorts of
occasions.

'Come, be a man, Jim,' I said, 'we've got to look the thing in the face;
there's no two ways about it. I shall go to Arizona Bill's claim and
see what he says. Anyhow I'll leave word with him what to do when we're
gone. I'd advise you not to try to see Jeanie; but if you will you must,
I suppose. Good-bye, old man. I shall make my way over to Jonathan's,
borrow a horse from him, and make tracks for the Hollow as soon as I
can. You'd better leave Jeanie here and do the same.'

Jim groaned, but said nothing. He wrung my hands till the bones seemed
to crack, and walked away without a word. We knew it was a chance
whether we should meet again.

I walked on pretty quick till I came to the flat where Arizona Bill and
his mates had their sluicing claim. There were six of them altogether,
tall wiry men all of them; they'd mostly been hunters and trappers in
the Rocky Mountains before the gold was struck at Suttor's Mill, in the
Sacramento Valley. They had been digging in '49 in California, but
had come over when they heard from an old mate of a placer diggings at
Turon, richer than anything they had ever tried in America.

This camp was half a mile from ours, and there was a bit of broken
ground between, so that I thought I was safe in having a word with them
before I cleared for Barnes's place, though I took care not to go
near our own camp hut. I walked over, and was making straight for the
smallest hut, when a rough voice hailed me.

'Hello! stranger, ye came darned near going to h--l with your boots on.
What did yer want agin that thar cabin?'

I saw then that in my hurry I had gone stumbling against a small hut
where they generally put their gold when the party had been washing up
and had more than was safe to start from camp with. In this they always
put a grizzled old hunter, about whom the yarn was that he never went
to sleep, and could shoot anything a mile off. It was thought a very
unlikely thing that any gold he watched would ever go crooked. Most
people considered him a deal safer caretaker than the escort.

'Oh! it's you, is it?' drawled Sacramento Joe. 'Why, what's doin' at yer
old camp?'

'What about?' sai