rew
perceptibly shorter. The regularity with which their length diminished
served to indicate that somewhere up the slope the last line would be so
short as to have scarcely length at all, and that beyond could come only
a point. The design was growing into an inverted "V." The converging
sides of this "V" marked the boundaries of the gold-bearing dirt.

The apex of the "V" was evidently the man's goal. Often he ran his eye
along the converging sides and on up the hill, trying to divine the
apex, the point where the gold-bearing dirt must cease. Here resided
"Mr. Pocket"--for so the man familiarly addressed the imaginary point
above him on the slope, crying out:

"Come down out o' that, Mr. Pocket! Be right smart an' agreeable, an'
come down!"

"All right," he would add later, in a voice resigned to determination.
"All right, Mr. Pocket. It's plain to me I got to come right up an'
snatch you out bald-headed. An' I'll do it! I'll do it!" he would
threaten still later.

Each pan he carried down to the water to wash, and as he went higher
up the hill the pans grew richer, until he began to save the gold in an
empty baking-powder can which he carried carelessly in his hip-pocket.
So engrossed was he in his toil that he did not notice the long twilight
of oncoming night. It was not until he tried vainly to see the gold
colors in the bottom of the pan that he realized the passage of time. He
straightened up abruptly. An expression of whimsical wonderment and awe
overspread his face as he drawled:

"Gosh darn my buttons! if I didn't plumb forget dinner!"

He stumbled across the stream in the darkness and lighted his
long-delayed fire. Flapjacks and bacon and warmed-over beans constituted
his supper. Then he smoked a pipe by the smouldering coals, listening to
the night noises and watching the moonlight stream through the canyon.
After that he unrolled his bed, took off his heavy shoes, and pulled the
blankets up to his chin. His face showed white in the moonlight, like
the face of a corpse. But it was a corpse that knew its resurrection,
for the man rose suddenly on one elbow and gazed across at his hillside.

"Good night, Mr. Pocket," he called sleepily. "Good night."

He slept through the early gray of morning until the direct rays of
the sun smote his closed eyelids, when he awoke with a start and looked
about him until he had established the continuity of his existence and
identified his present self with the days