and I didn't fear
much from white men,--still I concealed my tracks like this. Gold
often turns men into devils."

He was silent for a time, and Harry King wondered much why he had made
no further effort to find his son before making to himself the offer
he had, but he dared not question him, and preferred to let Larry take
his own way of telling what he would. As if divining his thought Larry
said quietly: "Something held me back from going down again to find my
son. The way is long, and in the old way of traveling over the plains
it would take a year or more to make the journey and return here, and
somehow a superstition seized me that my boy would set out sometime to
find me, and I would make the way easy for him to do it. And here on
the mountain the years slip by like a long sleep."

He began moving the torch about to show the walls of the cave in which
they sat, and as he did so he threw the light strongly on the young
man's face, and scrutinized it sharply. He saw again that terrible
look of sadness as if his soul were dying within him. He saw great
drops of sweat on his brow, and his eyes narrowed and fixed, and he
hurried on with the narrative. He could not bear the sight.

"Now here, look how this hole widens out? Here was where I prospected
about to find the vein again, and there is where I took it up. All
this overhead is full of gold. Think what it would mean if a man had
the right apparatus for getting it out--I mean separating it! I only
took what was free; that is, what could be easily freed from the
quartz. Sometimes I found it in fine nuggets, and then I would go
wild, and work until I was so weak I could hardly crawl back to the
entrance. I often lay down here and slept with fatigue before I could
get back and cook my supper."

As they went on a strange roaring seemed gradually to fill the
passage, and Harry spoke for the first time since they had entered. He
feared the sound of his own voice, as though if he began to speak, he
might scream out, or reveal something he was determined to hide. He
thought the roaring sound might be in his own ears from the surging of
blood in his veins and the tumultuous beating of his heart.

"What is it I hear? Is my head right?"

"The roaring? Yes, you're all right. I thought when I was working
here and slowly burrowing farther and farther that it might be the
lack of air, and tried to contrive some way of getting it from the
outside. I thought all the time tha