ine in three days!'

The two men grinned readily. Before now they had heard men talk with
the gold fever upon them.

'There's gold pretty near everywhere,' admitted Barstow, 'if a man can
make it pay. But right now I guess me and Chuck had better start
getting your stuff up the rocks. Suit you all right here for a camp?'

Helen turned and looked toward the south. There, broad and fertile
below her, running away across the miles, were the Howard acres. She
even made out the clutter of head-quarters buildings. Somehow she
fancied that the sweep of homely view snatched from these bleak uplands
something of their loneliness. When her father announced that this was
just the spot he had longed for, Helen nodded her approval. Here for a
time was to be home.

Throughout the day and until dusk the four of them laboured, making
camp. Barstow and Evans lugged the various articles, boxes, rolls of
bedding, up through the cleft in the rocks. They had brought in the
wagon-bed some loose boards of various sizes; these they made into a
rough floor. At the four corners of the floor they erected studding of
two-by-four lumber. These they braced and steadied; they nailed other
lengths of two-by-four material along the tops, outlining walls; they
hacked and sawed and hammered and nailed to such advantage that in the
end they had the misshapen frame of a cabin, rafters and all. Then
over the rafters and along the sides they secured the canvas destined
for the purpose. Doors and windows were canvas flaps; the sheet-iron
stove was set up on four flat stones for legs; the stovepipe was run
through a hole in the roof. And when Chuck Evans and Tod Barstow,
amateurs in the carpenter's line, stood back and wiped the sweat off
their brown faces and looked with fond and prideful eyes at their
handiwork, Helen and her father were no whit less delighted.

'If you want more room after a while,' said Barstow, 'it'd be easy to
tack more sheds on and run canvas over them, just the same as what we
done. Me and Chuck would come up most any time and lend a hand.'

The breeze stiffened and the crazy edifice shivered.

'I don't know as I'd make it much bigger,' said Evans. 'If a real blow
come on and the wind got inside--Say, Tod, how about a few guy ropes?
Huh?'

Barstow agreed, and they brought what ropes they had in the wagon and
'staked her out, same as if she was a runaway horse,' as Chuck put it.
In other words, they ran one r