few inches at a time until he reached
the side of his guide. It _was_ an awful world, and the swift glance he
had of it as he raised his eyes from the toes of his boots and looked
off across the ocean of peaks gave him the feeling that he was about to
fall over the edge of it. His pink, cherubic face turned saffron, and he
shrank back against the wall. He had been in perilous places before, but
this was the worst yet.

"There might be somethin' good over yonder if 'twas looked into right,"
went on Uncle Bill easily, as he stood with the ball of his feet hanging
over a precipice, staring speculatively. "But it'll be like to stay
there for a while, with these young bucks doin' all their prospectin'
around some sheet-iron stove. There's nobody around the camps these
days that ain't afraid of work, of gittin' lost, of sleepin' out of
their beds of nights. Prospectin' in underbrush and down timber is no
cinch, but it never stopped me when I was a young feller around sixty or
sixty-five." A dry, clicking sound as Sprudell swallowed made the old
man look around. "Hey--what's the matter? Aire you dizzy?"

Dizzy! Sprudell felt he was going to die. If his shaking knees should
suddenly give way beneath him he could see, by craning his neck
slightly, the exact spot where he was going to land. His chest, plump
and high like a woman's, rose and fell quickly with his hard breathing,
and the barrel of his rifle where he clasped it was damp with nervous
perspiration. His small mouth, with its full, red lips shaped like the
traditional cupid's bow, was colorless, and there was abject terror in
his infantile blue eyes. Yet superficially, T. Victor Sprudell was a
brave figure--picturesque as the drawing for a gunpowder "ad," a man of
fifty, yet excellently well preserved.

A plaid cap with a visor fore and aft matched his roomy knickerbockers,
and canvas leggings encased his rounded calves. His hob-nailed shoes were
the latest thing in "field boots," and his hunting coat was a credit to
the sporting house that had turned it out. His cartridge belt was new
and squeaky, and he had the last patents in waterproof match safes and
skinning knives. That goneness at his stomach, and the strange
sensations up and down his spine, seemed incongruous in such valorous
trappings. But he had them unmistakably, and they kept him cringing
close against the wall as though he had been glued.

It was not entirely the thought of standing there that paralyze