place where the wagons were "stuck" for
a while, "I'm going ahead to see what'll turn up."

"Don't go too far, that's all."

"Keep yer eye out for mines," shouted Yellow Pine, with a laugh, and
Sile took it seriously.

"It's a gold country," he said to himself, "and I might stumble upon
some of it."

That was precisely what he made out to do. He was marching along, with
his eyes on all the rocky precipices, as if the mouth of a gold-mine
might open to him at any moment, and he was not so careful of his feet
as he should have been. A loose stone shot away from under him, and down
he came upon a fairly level floor of sand and gravel. It was so sudden
and so sharp a dropping that he sat still for a moment and looked
around him.

"Halloo, what's that?" Something bright and yellow had caught his eye,
peering out at him from the gravel his boot-heel had disturbed. "Gold!
gold! A chunk of gold!"

Thousands upon thousands of "placer miners" have raised precisely such a
shout in just such sandy gullies, but Sile felt as if he were the first
being on earth to whom such an experience had ever happened. He at once
began to dig and sift among the gravel fiercely. He took out his
hunting-knife and plied it as a trowel. Little bits of dull yellow metal
rewarded him every now and then until he worked along to where a ledge
(or the edge of one) of quartz came nearly to the surface. On the upper
side of that, and lying closely against it, he pried out something that
made him shout "Hurrah!" and that then gave him almost a sick feeling.
It was a gathering of golden nuggets and particles which would nearly
have filled his hat, and there were others like it, only smaller, all
along the edge of that stone. For unknown centuries it had been serving
as a "bar" in the natural "washer" made by that ravine, and had caught
and kept whatever the torrents had borne down from crumbling quartz
rocks above and had drifted against it.

Sile thought of Aladdin and his wonderful lamp; then he thought of the
California miners; then he shut his eyes for a moment. Then he went on
digging, and he was hard at it when a tall form stooped over him and the
voice of Yellow Pine exclaimed,

"I'd call it--If the youngster hasn't lighted onto a placer and scooped
the biggest kind of a pocket! Sile, you've done it. You can jest ax me
all the fool questions you've a mind to after this. You was really
learnin' by 'em."

CHAPTER XI

A TRAPPED BOY