n a little flat, just under a steep wall of
reddish cliff. Here he and Chuck Evans unhitched and here the horses
were tethered. Helen looked about her curiously, and at first her
heart sank. There was nothing to greet her but rock and sweltering
patches of sand and gravelly soil, and sparse, harsh brush. She turned
and looked back toward the sweep of Desert Valley; there she saw green
fields, trees, grazing stock. It was like the Promised Land compared
with this bleak desolate spot her father had chosen. She turned to
him, words of expostulation forming. But his eyes were bright, his
look triumphant. He had already dismounted and was poking about here
and there, examining everything at hand from a sand-storm stratum at
the cliff's foot to loose dirt in the drifts and the hardy, wiry grass
growing where it could. Helen turned away with a sigh.

From here the two Desert Valley men went forward on foot to show them
the spot which Alan Howard had chosen as the most likely site for a
camp. They walked to the end of the flat where the reddish, walls shut
in; here was an angle of cliff and in the angle was a cleft some three
or four feet wide. They passed into this and found that it offered a
steep, winding way upward. But the distance was not great, and in ten
minutes they had come to the top. Here again was a level space, a wide
tableland, offering less of the desert menace and hostility and
something more of charm and the promise of comfort. For a gentle
breeze stirred here, and off yonder were scattered pines and cedars and
in a clump of trees was a ring of verdure. They went to it and saw the
spring. It was but a sort of mud-hole of yellowish, thickish water.
But water it was, with green grass growing about it and with the shade
of dusty trees over it. Beyond were the strange-shaped uplands,
distant cliffs and peaks broken into a thousand grotesque forms, with
bands of colour in horizontal strata across them as though they had
been painted with a mighty brush.

'What though I have never been here until this second?' cried
Longstreet triumphantly. 'I know it, all of it, every inch and
millimetre of it! I could have made a map of it and laid the colours
in. I have read of it, studied it--I have written of this country!
Having been right in everything else, am I to be mistaken in the matter
of its minerals? I said give me three months to find gold! Why, it's
a matter to wonder at if I don't locate my m