n '54 and that he
has had a picnic ever since. Though he couldn't have had much of a
picnic that first winter, when he camped out by the big log; and only a
few winters ago Palmer had to send him a quarter of beef."

"Well, Brown is a born detective," said Francis. "He worked up the
Caffey case like a professional."

Ben Caffey's brother had been hanged in Wisconsin, in the region of the
lead mines, ten years before. He was innocent of the crime charged, and
Ben had vowed vengeance on the jury. All twelve of the jurors, though
scattered over the country from New Orleans to the canon of the Middle
Yuba, had met violent deaths. The last man had been a neighbor of
Brown's. Just before his death a stranger with a limp left arm had
appeared at Moore's Flat; and Brown had proved to his own satisfaction
that the same man with a limp arm had appeared at New Orleans just
before the death of the eleventh juror in that city. The man with the
limp arm was Ben Caffey. Such was Brown's story. People had not paid
much attention to it, nor to the murdered man's lonely grave by the
river. Henry Francis, evidently, gave Brown full credence, but others
present regarded "Bed-bug Brown" as a joke. True, he was an intelligent
little man. He had taught school at Graniteville several winters, and
had succeeded better at this business than at placer mining on the bars
of the Middle Yuba. But "Bed-bug Brown," perennial picnicker, was not a
scientific sleuth.

So when the council of war broke up, a feeling of skepticism prevailed.
Mat Bailey saw more possibilities in his own suggestion than in the
$10,000 reward. Dr. Mason saw more possibilities, however slight, in the
reward than in the proposed detective. And Henry Francis, though he had
known Cummins from boyhood, and was even now settling up his estate,
pretended to see more possibilities in a stranger than in honest John
Keeler--or himself.

CHAPTER V

Old Man Palmer

Robert Palmer, tall, thin, bent with toil, had lived in California
thirty years. In May, 1849, when the snow drifts were still deep in the
canons of the Sierras, he had crossed the mountains, past Donner Lake
and the graves of the Donner party, through Emigrant's Gap, to the
valley of the Sacramento. He was thirty-two years old at that time,--no
mere youth, seeking treasure at the end of a rainbow. He was already a
man of experience and settled habits, inured to hardship and adverse
fortune. As a youth he had le