ill the stuff's actually in sight."

He studied the face of the cliff for a minute. The ledge jutted out from
the towering wall approximately twenty feet above our heads, but it
could be reached by a series of jagged points and knobs; a sort of
natural stairway--though some of the steps were a long way apart.
Boulders of all shapes and sizes lay bedded in the soft earth where we
stood.

"You shin up there, Sarge," Mac commanded, "and locate that mark. It
ought to be an easy climb."

I "shinned," and reached the ledge with a good deal of skin peeled from
various parts of my person. The first object my eye fell upon as I
hoisted myself above the four-foot shelf was a dull, yellow spot on the
gray rock, near enough so that I could lean forward and touch it with my
fingers. A two-inch circle of the real thing--I'd seen enough gold in
the raw to know it without any acid test--hammered into the coarse
sandstone. I pried it up with the blade of my knife and looked it over.
Originally it had been a fair-sized nugget. Hans or Rowan had pounded it
into place with the back of a hatchet (the corner-marks told me that),
flattening it to several times its natural diameter. I threw it down to
MacRae, and looked carefully along the ledge. There was no other mark
that I could see; I began to wonder if we were as hot on the scent as we
had thought.

"Is there a loose piece of rock up there?" Mac called presently. "If
there is, set it on the edge, in line with where this was."

I found a fragment about the size of my fist and set it on the rim of
the ledge. He squinted up at it a moment, then nodded, smiling.

"Come on down now, Sarge," he grinned; and, seating himself on a rock
with the carbine across his knees, he began to roll a cigarette, as if
the finding of Hank Rowan's gold-_cache_ were a thing of no importance
whatever.

"Well," I began, when I had negotiated that precarious succession of
knobs and notches and accumulated a fresh set of bruises, "why don't you
get busy? How much wiser are you now? Where's your gold-dust?"

He took a deliberate puff and squinted up at the ledge again. "I'm
sitting on it, as near as I can figure," he coolly asserted.

"Yes, you are," I fleered. "I'm from Missouri!"

"Oh, you're a doubting Thomas of the first water," he said. "Stand
behind me, you confounded unbeliever. Kink your back a little and look
over that stone you set for a mark. Do you see anything that catches
your attention?"