st white. Some men
have been trying to get into the bent old man's cabin at night to find
the buried treasure. The old man's double-barreled shot-gun has barked
in their faces; and there has been a thinly attended funeral. The camp
is low, miserable. The tide is out. Wrecks of rockers, toms, sluices,
flumes, derricks, battered pans, tom-irons, cradles, old cabin, strew
the sandy strand.

This last act has left the old man utterly alone; yet he is seen even
more frequently than before at the "Deadfall." Is he trying to forget
that man had died at his hand?

Now and then you see him leading a tawny boy about, and talking in a
low, tender way of better things than his life and appearance would
indicate. The man is still on the down grade. And yet how long he has
been on this decline! One would say he should be at the bottom by this
time.

When we reflect how very far a man can fall, we can estimate something
of the height in which he stands when fresh from his Maker's hand.

Sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, twenty, twenty-one years! The
iron-gray hair is white as the snow on the mountain-tops that environ
him. The tall man is bent as a tree is bent when the winter snow lies
heavily on its branches. The tawny boy is grown a man now. This is John
Logan, the fugitive. The two homeless children have long since taken his
place.

And still the pick clangs on in that dark, damp tunnel that is always
dripping, dripping, dripping, where it looks out at the glaring day, as
if in eternal tears for the wasted life within. Yet now there is hope.

New life has been infused into this old camp of late years. The tide is
flowing in. The placer mines have perished and passed into history. But
there is a new industry discovered. It is quartz mining--the very thing
that this old man has given his life to establish. And it is this that
has kept the old man up, alive, for the past few years. He is now
certain that he will strike it yet.

Is there some one waiting still, far away? We do not know. He does not
know now. Years and years ago, utterly discouraged, yet mechanically
keeping on, he ceased to write.

But now these two new lives here have ran into his. If he could only
strike it now! If he could only strike it for them!

It is mid-winter. The three are almost starving. Old Forty-nine has been
prudent, cautious, careful of the two helpless waifs thrown into his
hands. Could he, old, broken, destitute, friendless, stand up