ed that day in the wolf-dog,
so in him recrudesced all the old hot desire of gold-hunting. Dropping
the hammer and pipe-wrench, but retaining pick and shovel, he climbed
up the slide to where a vague line of outputting but mostly
soil-covered rock could be seen. It was all but indiscernible, but his
practised eye had sketched the hidden formation which it signified.
Here and there, along this wall of the vein, he attacked the crumbling
rock with the pick and shoveled the encumbering soil away. Several
times he examined this rock. So soft was some of it that he could
break it in his fingers. Shifting a dozen feet higher up, he again
attacked with pick and shovel. And this time, when he rubbed the soil
from a chunk of rock and looked, he straightened up suddenly, gasping
with delight. And then, like a deer at a drinking pool in fear of its
enemies, he flung a quick glance around to see if any eye were gazing
upon him. He grinned at his own foolishness and returned to his
examination of the chunk. A slant of sunlight fell on it, and it was
all aglitter with tiny specks of unmistakable free gold.

"From the grass roots down," he muttered in an awestricken voice, as he
swung his pick into the yielding surface.

He seemed to undergo a transformation. No quart of cocktails had ever
put such a flame in his cheeks nor such a fire in his eyes. As he
worked, he was caught up in the old passion that had ruled most of his
life. A frenzy seized him that markedly increased from moment to
moment. He worked like a madman, till he panted from his exertions and
the sweat dripped from his face to the ground. He quested across the
face of the slide to the opposite wall of the vein and back again.
And, midway, he dug down through the red volcanic earth that had washed
from the disintegrating hill above, until he uncovered quartz, rotten
quartz, that broke and crumbled in his hands and showed to be alive
with free gold.

Sometimes he started small slides of earth that covered up his work and
compelled him to dig again. Once, he was swept fifty feet down the
canon-side; but he floundered and scrambled up again without pausing
for breath. He hit upon quartz that was so rotten that it was almost
like clay, and here the gold was richer than ever. It was a veritable
treasure chamber. For a hundred feet up and down he traced the walls
of the vein. He even climbed over the canon-lip to look along the brow
of the hill for signs o