d, "but it won't do for me to cross 'em too much on such a
thing."

Back they went for a hundred yards, while the fuse burnt its slow,
sputtering way down through the "tamping" Bill had rammed around it.

They had not long to wait. The blazing fires lit up the whole ledge
and the bordering cliffs, and the miners could see distinctly
everything that happened on it. Suddenly there came a puff of smoke
from the drill-hole. Then the rock outside of it, toward the chasm,
rose a little, and a great fragment of it tumbled over down the ledge,
while a dull, thunderous burst of sound startled the silence of the
night, and awaked all the echoes of the cliffs and the canyon.

No such sound had ever before been heard there, by night or by day,
since the world was made; but Captain Skinner and his miners were not
thinking of things like that.

"That'll do, boys," he said. "There'll be powder-marks on that rock
for twenty years. Our claim's good now, if any of us ever come back to
make it."

The men thought of how rich a mine it was, and each one promised
himself that he would come back, whether the rest did or not.

It is not easy to tire out fellows as tough as they were, but Captain
Skinner was a "fair boss," as they all knew, and the men who stood
sentinel around his camp that night were not the men who toiled so hard
on the mine.

"He doesn't seem to need any sleep himself," remarked one of them to
Bill, as they were routed out of their blankets an hour before daylight
the next morning.

"You'll have to eat your breakfast on horseback, you three," he said to
them. "Strike right for the gap, and if you come across anything that
doesn't look right, you can send one of you back to let me know.
Sharp, now! We won't be long in following."

Their horses were quickly saddled, and away they rode, each man doing
his best, as he went, with a huge piece of cold roast venison. The
Captain had remarked to them, "That'll do ye. Your coffee'll be just
as hot as ours."

That meant that the cold water of one mountain stream was just about as
pleasant to drink as that of another.

Bill and his two comrades were not the men to grumble over a piece of
necessary duty like that, and they knew it was "their turn."

The sun was well up before they reached the head of the gap, and a
glance showed them that it was all the hunters had prophesied of it.
It was, in fact, a sort of natural highway from that table-land down to
the val