once again the food-supply was nearly gone. Keno kept the
pile of fuel reasonably high, but cheer was not so prevalent in the
cabin as to ask for further room. The grave little pilgrim was just a
trifle quieter and less inclined to eat. He caught a cold, as tiny as
himself, but bore its miseries uncomplainingly. In fact, he had never
cried so much as once since his coming to the cabin; and neither had he
smiled.

In sheer concern old Jim went forth that cold and windy afternoon of
the day but four removed from Christmas, to make at least a show of
working on his claim. Keno, Skeezucks, and the pup remained behind,
the little red-headed man being busily engaged in some great culinary
mystery from which he said his lemon-pie for Christmas should evolve.

When presently Jim stood beside the meagre post-hole he had made once
upon a time, as a starter for a mining-shaft, he looked at it ruefully.
How horridly hard that rock appeared! What a wretched little scar it
was he had made with all that labor he remembered so vividly! What was
the good of digging here? Nothing!

Dragging his pick, he looked for a softer spot in which to sink the
steel. There were no softer spots. And the pick helve grew so
intensely cold! Jim dropped it to the ground, and with hands thrust
into his armpits, for the warmth afforded, he hunched himself dismally
and scanned the prospect with doleful eyes. Why couldn't the hill
break open, anyhow, and show whether anything worth the having were
contained in its bulk or not?

A last summer's mullen stock, beating incessantly in the wind, seemed
the only thing alive on all that vast outbulging of the earth. The
stunted brush stiffly carded the breeze that blew so persistently.

From rock to rock the gray old miner's gaze went wandering. So
undisturbed had been the surface of the earth since he had owned the
claim that a shallow channel, sluiced in the earth by a freshet of the
spring long past, remained as the waters had cut it. Slowly up the
course of this insignificant cicatrice old Jim ascended, his hands
still held beneath his arms, his long mustache and his grizzled beard
blown awry in the breeze. The pick he left behind.

Coming thus to a deeper gouge in the sand of the hill, he halted and
gazed attentively at a thick seam of rock outcropping sharply where the
long-gone freshet had laid it bare. In mining parlance it was
"quartzy." To Jim it appeared even more. He stooped abov