derable distance on foot before
he halted for supper. Here he was again fortunate. An empty lumber
team watering at the same spring, its driver offered to take Clarence's
purchases--for the boy had profited by his late friend's suggestion to
personally detach himself from his equipment--to Buckeye Mills for a
dollar, which would also include a "shakedown passage" for himself on
the floor of the wagon. "I reckon you've been foolin' away in Sacramento
the money yer parents give yer for return stage fare, eh? Don't
lie, sonny," he added grimly, as the now artful Clarence smiled
diplomatically, "I've been thar myself!" Luckily, the excuse that he was
"tired and sleepy" prevented further dangerous questioning, and the boy
was soon really in deep slumber on the wagon floor.

He awoke betimes to find himself already in the mountains. Buckeye
Mills was a straggling settlement, and Clarence prudently stopped any
embarrassing inquiry from his friend by dropping off the wagon with
his equipment as they entered it, and hurriedly saying "Good-by" from a
crossroad through the woods. He had learned that the nearest mining camp
was five miles away, and its direction was indicated by a long wooden
"flume," or water-way, that alternately appeared and disappeared on the
flank of the mountain opposite. The cooler and drier air, the grateful
shadow of pine and bay, and the spicy balsamic odors that everywhere
greeted him, thrilled and exhilarated him. The trail plunging sometimes
into an undisturbed forest, he started the birds before him like a
flight of arrows through its dim recesses; at times he hung breathlessly
over the blue depths of canyons where the same forests were repeated a
thousand feet below. Towards noon he struck into a rude road--evidently
the thoroughfare of the locality--and was surprised to find that it,
as well as the adjacent soil wherever disturbed, was a deep Indian red.
Everywhere, along its sides, powdering the banks and boles of trees with
its ruddy stain, in mounds and hillocks of piled dirt on the road, or
in liquid paint-like pools, when a trickling stream had formed a gutter
across it, there was always the same deep sanguinary color. Once or
twice it became more vivid in contrast with the white teeth of quartz
that peeped through it from the hillside or crossed the road in crumbled
strata. One of those pieces Clarence picked up with a quickening pulse.
It was veined and streaked with shining mica and tiny glit