rung up here and there
in the foothills, there was bloody defiance of the tax collector. Other
groups became highwaymen, who robbed and murdered the blond race whom
they felt had cheated and maltreated them, stabbing from ambush, or
organizing into bands of road agents, who systematically robbed miners of
their dust and stage drivers of their express boxes, and as often
murdering their victims.

There was Rattlesnake Dick, among other desperadoes, who with two
gangsters, Alverez and Garcia, had terrorized the gold diggings till,
five years after the gold rush, he had been killed by a rival bad man.

Ace was so tired, he rested again that day, merely bringing his bi-plane
in to the new camp site.

As Long Lester drawled over the camp fire, the drowsy boys lived again in
the days when a pinch of gold dust in a buckskin bag was currency, and
red shirted miners gambled away their gains or drank it up, in a land of
hot sunshine and hard toil, where a tin cup and a frying pan largely
comprised their bachelor housekeeping apparatus, their provender such as
could be brought in on jingle belled mule teams, their chief diversions
the occasional open air meeting or the lynchings of their necessarily
rough and ready justice.

The more adventurous always abandoned a moderate prospect for a gold
rush. Some of them made rich strikes; others ended their days in poverty,
after all.

The fire drowsed to a bed of red coals and the old man's chin was sunk in
his whiskers, but still he talked on, almost as if in his sleep, and
still the boys propped their eyes open while they stowed away in their
memories pictures of the pony express riders, of the horse thieves
branded--in this land of horseback distances--by having their ears cut
off, and of the unshaven miners, sashes bound Mexican fashion around the
tops of their pantaloons, the bottoms thrust into their boots, slouch
hats shading their unshaven faces, as they panned the glittering
sediments or built their sluices, with rocks for retaining the heavy
particles of gold washed over them.

Gold had been found in a belt 500 miles long by 50 wide,--and it was a
cherished myth that somewhere along the crest of the range lay a mother
lode.

But that, Norris told them, was not the way of the precious metal. The
"mother lode" was a myth.

The next day the two boys started once again to look for the
incendiaries, for when Ace set out to do a thing, it was do or die.

Pedro had now over