lay.

He had a strange audience, the greedy white-fanged beasts that slunk
away at the first strains of the unwonted sound, stole back, yet moved
uneasily away again, the little fat, inquisitive prairie dogs that
popped out of their burrows and sat up to listen, the circling
nighthawks that wheeled and called overhead. Hour after hour he
played, but whenever he paused the hungry circle drew in about him and
he was forced to raise his aching arm and ply his bow again. The first
hint of dawn was brightening the sky when the creatures of the night
began to slip away, and Felix, laying down his violin, suddenly
laughed aloud.

"I wish that Granny Fullerton, who thought that it wasn't quite safe
for us to live on the Windy Hill," he said, "I wish that she could see
me now!"

Then he lay down, pillowed his head upon his arm, and fell so fast
asleep that, as he said afterward, "a whole tribe of Indians could
have ridden over him and he would never have moved."

It was, indeed, horse's feet that aroused him, but not, by good
fortune, the unshod hoofs of Indian ponies. A band of men was riding
toward him from the westward, hard, grizzled men, weather-beaten and
toil-worn beyond anything Felix had ever seen.

"We met your party back yonder," said their leader. "They asked us to
look out for you as we went by. Glad to see the Indians haven't got
you yet."

"Oh!" exclaimed Felix, sitting up and rubbing his eyes, "Have
you--have you been in California?"

The man nodded. He drew out of his pocket a greasy little buckskin
bag, opened the strings, and poured a stream of something yellow into
the boy's hand.

"Ever see gold dust before?" he asked.

It was Felix's first sight of the odd, flattened flakes of metal that
shine dully in your hand, that are no two alike, so that you can turn
them over and over, always seeing different shapes and sizes,
different gleams and lights upon their changing surfaces.

"There's a lot of it back there where we've been," the man said,
grinning slowly as he saw Felix's excited face. "We left it there for
you and those like you."

"And did you find all you wanted? Are you going home now to be rich
and comfortable all your days?" the boy inquired.

The man's grin grew broader still.

"You don't know gold miners, sonny," he said. "We've been at work on
the American River diggings, where your folks ahead there are going,
and we found it good enough, but we've heard of something better. Over