same day they came to the remains of an old hut, now overgrown
inside and out with vines and underbrush. In one corner the old man
unearthed what he pronounced to be the rusted mining tools of the early
days. A fallen tree that lay across the doorway had to be chopped through
and cleared away before they could enter, and on stripping a bit of the
dry bark away for firewood, Pedro was puzzled to find what appeared like
hieroglyphics on its nether side. He showed Norris, but what it could be
he could not imagine, till Norris happened to try his pocket shaving
mirror on it. Then, clear as carving, only inverted, they spelled out the
legend:

"CLAME NOTISE--JUMPERS WILL BE SHOT."

These were evidently the letters that had been carved on the tree
trunk--as they judged, about six feet above its base, and though the sap
had long since obliterated the original, the bark still told the story
where it had grown over the wound. By chopping through the log at that
point and making a rough count of the annual rings of growth, they
estimated that all this had happened forty years ago. What had become of
the old miner? For such his tools acclaimed him. Why had he never come
back? Had he been overtaken by bandits, robbed of his buckskin bag of
dust, and murdered? Or had he struck a richer claim elsewhere?

They dug beneath what once had been his crude stone hearth, in the hope
of buried treasure, but no such luck rewarded them, and finally they
moved on up the mountainside, past vistas of green-black firs and
yellow-green alders. As usual in these dry altitudes, the fiery sun of
noon-day had grown chill at sunset, the wind stopped singing through the
pines, and the weird bark of a coyote seemed to accentuate the loneliness
that the wilderness knows most of all when some abandoned human
habitation brings it home to one.

But a heaped up bon-fire and a singing kettle soon drove the shadows from
the circling mountain meadow that was to be their home for the night.

"Thet there cabin," drawled Lester, "sure made me feel as if I were back
on my old stamping grounds. 'Minds me of the place where I once found a
chunk o' glassy white quartz half the size of my head with flakes of
color in it that netted me $200. I spent quite consid'able time hunting
for the vein that came from, but I never did, nohow."

Norris explained to Ted and Pedro that a quartz bowlder will often be
washed along a river.

*