hed the sides of the
mountains across the river. It seemed a trifle less lonely if
occasionally he caught a glimpse of Slim, no bigger than an insect,
crawling over the rocks and around the peaks. Yet each time that he saw
him Bruce's heavy black eyebrows came together in a troubled frown, for
the sight reminded him of the increasing frequency of their quarrels.

"If he hadn't soldiered," he muttered as he saw Slim climbing out of a
gulch, "he could have had a good little grub-stake for winter. Winter's
going to come quick, the way the willows are turning black. Let it come.
I've got to pull out, anyhow, as things are going. But"--his eyes
kindled as he looked at the high bank into which his tunnel ran--"I
certainly am getting into great dirt."

It was obvious that the sand bar where he was placering had once been
the river bed, but when the mighty stream, in the course of centuries,
cut into the mountain opposite it changed the channel, leaving bed rock
and bowlders, which eventually were covered by sand and gravel deposited
by the spring floods. In this deposit there was enough flour-gold to
enable any good placer miner to make days' wages by rocking the rich
streaks along the bars and banks.

This particular sand bar rose from a depth of five feet near the water's
edge to a height of two hundred feet or more against the mountain at the
back. There was enough of it carrying fine gold to inflame the
imagination of the most conservative and set the least speculative to
calculating. A dozen times a day Bruce looked at it and said to himself:

"If only there was some way of getting water on it!"

For many miles on that side of the river there was no mountain stream to
flume, no possibility of bringing it, even from a long distance, through
a ditch, so the slow and laborious process he was employing seemed the
only method of recovering the gold that was but an infinitesimal
proportion of what he believed the big bar contained.

While he worked, the sun came up warm, and then grew dim with a kind of
haze.

"A storm's brewing," he told himself. "The first big snow is long
overdue, so we'll get it right when it comes."

His friends, the kingfishers, who had lived all summer in a hole at the
top of the bank, had long since gone, and the camp-robbers, who scolded
him incessantly, sat silent in the tall pine trees near the cabin. He
noticed that the eagle that nested in an inaccessible peak across the
river swooped for