e event that I say things look extra good, you'd
better slip Jerkline Jo a little sob story, and get her to let you drag
down what you got comin' on your wages--and slip that to me, too. By
golly, Hooker, once I get a toehold, Millions is my middle name."

Hiram smiled wryly.

On through the day the teams plodded toward the mountain pass. Hiram
rode with Jerkline Jo in their movable schoolroom, and left Tweet to
his own thoughts behind the blacks. They camped on the desert that
night, at a ranch conveniently situated between Julia and the
mountains, where was an abundance of artesian water. Next day at one
o'clock they left the flat, hot sweeps and ascended steadily into firs
and pines on the old mines road.

They were obliged to stop frequently and make repairs in the road and
to clear away brush that for years had been overgrowing the course of
their steep climb.

Often as they ascended laboriously they followed shelves hacked in
mountainsides, with the desert they had left thousands of feet below
them. There were places where a solid wall of rock upreared itself on
one side of the narrow road, while on the other side a precipice
dropped straight down, and tall pines at its base looked like
toothpicks. There were hair-pin curves which taxed the skinners'
ingenuity, where the one or the other of their pointers would cross the
chain to pull the wagons away from the banks, and often both pointers
were obliged to leave the road entirely and pull along the sides of
precipices.

However, they topped the highest point in the pass before darkness had
overtaken them completely. They camped for the night beside a
picturesque and cold mountain lake, at an altitude of six thousand five
hundred feet.

Morning showed them the desert, sweeping away again on the other side
of the range. There still remained twenty-five miles to be traveled,
eight of them comprising the descent through the pass.

Once down on the level again, Hiram turned his team over to the care of
Tweet, and boarded Jo's wagon for the continuation of his education.

So they crawled on persistently, and eventually, ahead of them over the
desert, white tents glowed pink in the sunlight like toadstools in a
great timberless pasture, and their first trip was nearing its end.

When they reached the first cluster of tents Jerkline Jo discovered
that they represented the largest of the subcontractors to whom her
freight had been consigned. The next one