aring sign in
crude gold letters, "Last Nugget," from which came the creak of iddles
and scrape of boots, and hoarse mirth. Joan saw strange, wild-looking
creatures--women that made her shrink; and several others of her sex,
hurrying along, carrying sacks or buckets, worn and bewildered-looking
women, the sight of whom gave her a pang. She saw lounging Indians and
groups of lazy, bearded men, just like Kells's band, and gamblers in
long, black coats, and frontiersmen in fringed buckskin, and Mexicans
with swarthy faces under wide, peaked sombreros; and then in great
majority, dominating that stream of life, the lean and stalwart miners,
of all ages, in their check shirts and high boots, all packing guns,
jostling along, dark-browed, somber, and intent. These last were the
workers of this vast beehive; the others were the drones, the parasites.

Kell's party rode on through the town, and Smith halted them beyond the
outskirts, near a grove of spruce-trees, where camp was to be made.

Joan pondered over her impression of Alder Creek. It was confused; she
had seen too much. But out of what she had seen and heard loomed two
contrasting features: a throng of toiling miners, slaves to their lust
for gold and actuated by ambitions, hopes, and aims, honest, rugged,
tireless workers, but frenzied in that strange pursuit; and a lesser
crowd, like leeches, living for and off the gold they did not dig with
blood of hand and sweat of brow.

Manifestly Jesse Smith had selected the spot for Kells's permanent
location at Alder Creek with an eye for the bandit's peculiar needs. It
was out of sight of town, yet within a hundred rods of the nearest huts,
and closer than that to a sawmill. It could be approached by a shallow
ravine that wound away toward the creek. It was backed up against a
rugged bluff in which there was a narrow gorge, choked with pieces of
weathered cliff; and no doubt the bandits could go and come in that
direction. There was a spring near at hand and a grove of spruce-trees.
The ground was rocky, and apparently unfit for the digging of gold.

While Bate Wood began preparations for supper, and Cleve built the fire,
and Smith looked after the horses, Kells and Pearce stepped off the
ground where the cabin was to be erected. They selected a level bench
down upon which a huge cracked rock, as large as a house, had rolled.
The cabin was to be backed up against this stone, and in the rear, under
cover of it, a secret ex