“NO, no,” said Jack. “I think you ought to go home. Besides, it’s too dangerous. I don’t like the responsibility of taking you back there.”

“But look here, Jack,” Percy persisted. “We are given leave to stay if there is a good reason for staying; and surely we have a good enough reason now. When we set out from Golconda our chief object was to help you to find gold, and here is not only the best, but the only real chance we have had. Then again, as to the danger, the only danger is from Squeaky, and in my opinion we run less risk from him now than we did in the beginning, for he is disarmed,—for the present, at any rate,—and, besides that, we know what to expect of him, and we will keep on the lookout accordingly. I don’t think he will catch us again.”

“There’s another thing,” said I. “It is a great deal more dangerous for you to go by yourself than it is for all three to go together. You can’t prospect by day and stand guard by night.”

“But——”

“Hold up!” exclaimed Percy, cutting in before Jack could get any farther. “I’ll tell you what we’ll do—if Tom will agree. As Tom says, you certainly can’t prospect by day and stand guard by night; you’d wear out in two days. Well, we may not be much to brag of as prospectors, but we can stand guard just as well as anybody; and here is what I propose to do: We’ll go back to the thieves’ den; we’ll carefully examine the whole valley to make sure that Squeaky hasn’t returned,—though as to that, we should see his tracks, because, you remember, it rained as we came out,—and if he is not there, which he won’t be, I’m pretty sure, Tom and I will take it in turn to stand guard in that little fortification, day and night, and night and day; we’ll just live there; and I’d like to see Squeaky or anybody else pass those bars while we are squinting at them through the loopholes with a rifle in our hands. There! What do you say, Tom?”

“I’m agreed,” said I, briefly.

“Then what do you say, Jack?”

“I say you’re a bully good pair of fellows, and I’m ever so much obliged to you, and I accept your offer. Back we go, all three of us.”

“Hurrah!” shouted Percy. “When?”

“To-morrow morning, if possible. But we must hustle, for we have plenty to do before then. Let me think.”

Our captain stood silent for a minute, and then, in a quick, decisive manner, issued his orders.

“I must go,” said he, “and hunt up the sheriff and tell him about those horses. If he’ll go back with us, so much the better. While I’m doing that—and there’s no telling how long it will take me—you must go and buy some hay—the grass here is no good—and a small sack of oats, and give the mules and horses a good feed. When you have done that, go to a store—the one where the post-office is—and buy two fifty-pound sacks of flour and twenty-five pounds of sugar, and wait there until I join you. While you are waiting, buy some writing-paper and write home. That’s all. Off you go!”

In the course of an hour or so we had fulfilled these commands, and had each of us written a long letter home, when Jack joined us in the store. He had been obliged to wait for some time in the sheriff’s office, and had himself utilised the time by writing letters.

“It’s all fixed,” said he. “A deputy sheriff is coming with us; he will come to our camp the first thing to-morrow morning, and we’ll all go together.”

This was very satisfactory; we felt that we should have the law on our side, and if there was any shooting to be done, the deputy would be the one to do it, which, I must confess, was a very comforting reflection.

It was a great satisfaction to me, therefore, when, soon after sunrise, the deputy appeared, a thin, wiry man, with a hooked nose and high cheek-bones; and not only he, but another man, a burly fellow with a black beard. A determined-looking pair they were, and I thought I would a good deal rather have them on my side in a fight than against me.

We set off at once, and soon after midday of the second day we were back again on the hog-back.

As we went down the dry watercourse, the bearded man, looking upward at the rock which overhung the edge of the chasm, remarked:

“That there rock up there, if it was to fall down, would block this passage pretty neat. A man ’ud need stand from under if he didn’t want to be squeezed out as flat as the king of trumps.”

“That’s what,” replied the deputy. “Looks as if a man might shove it down with his foot, too, don’t it? Hallo! Up that way, eh?”—as Jack, who was leading, turned to the right and began to go up the waterway.

We ascended the slope, waded through the tunnel, which greatly excited the astonishment of the two men, and went on part way down the second dry watercourse, but as we turned the corner which brought us in sight of the bars Jack pulled up, and addressing the men, said:

“There’s a set of bars here, and a little stone fort just beyond. If the men have come back, and if they have any arms, that is where they’ll be.”

“Very well,” said the deputy, calmly, “then it’s my business to turn them out. It’s no concern of you boys; so you can keep out of range. Just stay here while I go down.”

Without more ado he stepped round the corner, stood for a minute with his cocked rifle in his hand gazing earnestly at the loopholes, and then marched straight down the middle of the ravine, climbed over the bars, and scrambled up into the little fort.

“Nobody here,” said he, jumping down again; and coming back to the bars he let them down for us to pass through.

It was an extremely plucky thing to do, in my opinion. I know that nothing would have induced me to face those loopholes. But the deputy seemed to be absolutely without fear; I myself, standing in safety around the corner, was a great deal more afraid for him than he appeared to be for himself. He was taking his life in his hands, for all he knew, and yet he did it as calmly as though it were part of an ordinary day’s work. He was an uncommonly plucky fellow, that deputy.

We were soon at the exit of the gully, and there Jack once more requested a halt. Going forward a short distance, he examined the ground carefully, and then called out: “It’s all right. Nobody has been down here.”

At the mouth of the gully there lay a fan-shaped bed of sand, brought down by the overflow of the spring above. The rain of three or four days ago had been heavy enough to send a thin stream of water over it, obliterating all the old tracks and leaving it perfectly smooth. There was not a foot-mark or a hoof-mark upon it, old or new.

This was a very satisfactory discovery, and we rode on down into the valley with a great accession of confidence.

“Well!” exclaimed the deputy, as he issued from among the trees and surveyed the little valley with its surrounding wall, “if this isn’t the very finest ready-made corral for the horse-thief business ever I saw, call me a horse-thief myself!”

“And how they ever come to find it beats me!” added his companion.

“Some hunter or prospector, maybe, hiding from the Indians in among the rocks up above there, got into the stream to cover his tracks, and so found the tunnel,” suggested the deputy.

“That’s it, likely,” said the other. “But there’s deer in here too. I see a bunch of ’em down at the far end now. How’d they get in? Same way?”

“Same way, I guess, unless they tumbled in. The horses is down there too, I see; we may as well go and round ’em up right away. It isn’t more ’n two o’clock, and we may just as well dig out at once. We’ll make ten miles on the back track before night.”

“Then,” said Jack, “while you are getting up the horses, we three will make a tour of the valley to see if there is any way but this of getting in or out. Come on, you fellows; if we set off at once we can make the round before the others are ready to leave.”

Our survey, which occupied about an hour, disclosed the fact that, excepting at two points, the wall surrounding the valley was at least forty feet higher than the tops of the trees which grew upon the slopes below it. The first of these exceptions was immediately behind the Mushroom Rock. There the bank extended from the foot of the rock up to within twenty feet of the top of the wall; if one had a ladder of that length he might get out there. The second exception was at the cañon, where the stream left the valley; but as to getting out in that direction, it seemed as impossible as it would be to fly over the wall itself. The gorge was crowded with great boulders fallen from above, between which rushed the foaming stream—the maddest, fiercest little river I ever saw. None but a man in the last straits of desperation would ever think of attempting the passage; he would be pounded to death in five minutes, almost to a certainty.

The result of this tour was most gratifying to us; it proved conclusively that if Squeaky should entertain the idea of paying us a visit, he could not come in except by the “high road,” and as long as we occupied the fort he could not come that way either without our leave. It was therefore with perfect confidence in our ability to take care of ourselves that we watched the departure of our two friends, and, accompanying them as far as the bars, shouted “Good-bye!” to them as they rode off round the corner, with the clattering herd of stolen horses going on before.

“Now,” said Jack, “we will go to work systematically, and we’ll begin by setting a guard. Tom, will you go on from now till supper-time?”

“All right,” said I, promptly.

“You and I, Percy,” he continued, “will see if we can’t improve this barrier, so that nobody can come in without making a noise. I think I know how it may be done. Come with me. Ulysses shall stay with you, Tom.”

As I took my station in the fort, the other two walked off down the gulley, and soon afterwards I heard above my head the sound of an axe; they were chopping wood up there for some reason or other. Presently Jack appeared upon the edge of the ravine, called out, “Look out, below!” and then, crash! came a small dead pine-tree to the bottom of the gully on the upper side of the bars. Two others followed, when Percy came down again, and having arranged the three trees so that they lay side by side, completely covering the whole width of the bed of the gorge, he looked up and shouted, “All right, Jack, send down the rest!” Down came three more trees, which were placed upon the top of the others, and the bars were then restored to their places. It was a great addition to our defences. The trees, arranged with their butts down-hill, presented a mass of brittle points to any intruder, and nobody could possibly climb over them or remove them without making a noise loud enough to arouse the sentinel if he should happen to be dozing; and as it was our intention that the sharp-eared Ulysses should always be a member of the guard, we were satisfied that now, at any rate, neither Squeaky nor anybody else could pass the bars without our permission.

This abatis being completed, Jack and Percy went off to arrange the camp, selecting a position in a bunch of trees a little to one side of the mouth of the gully, and soon after sunset Percy came up to relieve guard and to give me an opportunity to get my supper.

While I was thus engaged, Jack explained to me the course he proposed to follow, and the arrangement of the order of guard-mounting, of which he was to take his share at night; after which, leaving Percy and Ulysses to keep the first watch, he and I retired to bed.

Until all these preliminaries had been settled, Jack did not so much as mention the word “gold,” but next morning, soon after sunrise, while I took my place as sentinel for the day, he and Percy, who, as the finder of the nugget, naturally accompanied him to show him the place, went off together for the first day’s prospecting.

The stream, as I think I have mentioned, had cut for itself a little groove in the solid stone floor of the valley, while the floor itself, for a space of twenty feet on either side of the groove, had been laid bare by occasional freshets. Upon this level, smooth-swept surface stood the Mushroom Rock.

How it ever came there was a puzzle. It could not have rolled down the mountain, for, as Jack at once discovered, it was composed of two different kinds of stone, the lower being a sandstone, the upper a granite rock, and, of course, had it fallen from the mountain the pieces would have come apart in doing so. Jack’s solution of the problem appeared to be the only reasonable one. He said it must be one of those vagrant rocks known as “erratic boulders,” which had been carried here during the glacial period, and had been left standing when the ice melted away under it. That such a top-heavy rock should not have upset on the journey was hard to believe, but, in all probability, the stem had been originally as large in circumference as the cap—larger, perhaps—but being of softer material it had worn away in the course of ages more rapidly than the upper part.

Percy led the way to the spot where he had found his gold button, and pointed out to Jack the curious round hole in the bed of the stream from which it had come. There were several of these pot-holes, all of them, as it happened, down-stream from Mushroom Rock. They had been formed by the rattling around in them of a pebble, the hole ever growing larger and the pebble ever becoming smaller, until at last in the unequal contest the latter had been worn out entirely. Some of the holes were large enough to hold a bucketful of water; it must have taken hundreds of years and worn out hundreds of pebbles to make them.

Having inspected these pot-holes, and having found that each one of them had its little bed of black sand lying in the bottom, Jack said:

“Well, Percy, the first thing to be done is to gather as much as we can of this black sand and test it for gold. The greater part of the gold—if there is any—will be below the sand; so the holes must be scraped out perfectly clean.”

Percy agreed that this was undoubtedly the proper course; but having come to this decision without any trouble they were next confronted by the question,—How were they to do it? It would be an everlasting task to pick up the sand in pinches between one’s finger and thumb, and even then it would be impossible to clear the holes entirely of the residue which they expected to be the most valuable, if not the only valuable, part. Jack’s inventive mind hit upon the means of getting out the bulk of the sand. He ran back to the camp, and returning with one of our spoons in his hand, he bent the head of this domestic implement at right angles to the handle, thus forming of it a kind of scoop.

Selecting as the first to be tested the hole in which Percy had found the nugget, he went down upon his hands and knees and ladled up a spoonful of the deposit. Up came the spoon, brimming with sand, but the moment it reached the surface the current whisked away the contents, and the spoon was empty. This process had every appearance of being a failure.

“Hold up a second,” cried Jack; and off he ran once more to the camp, returning directly with a small tin cup in his hand. This he set in the bottom of the hole and filled by means of the spoon, and then, taking it up with the palm of his hand covering the top, he emptied it into the gold-pan which Percy was holding in readiness.

So far, so good; but presently Jack had scraped out all that the spoon would take up, and still there was a good deal of material left at the bottom of the hole. In turn they peered down through the water, persuading themselves that they could detect a yellow shimmer about the residue—though the ripple and flash of the stream rendered it very uncertain whether they were right or not—but scrape and scrape as they might, they could get up no more of the sand. The matter could not, of course, be left in this unsatisfactory state;—but what were they to do?

For some time they sat side by side upon the edge of the stream, like a pair of pelicans waiting for a fish, trying to think of some means of clearing out the hole, until, presently, Percy slapped his knee and exclaimed:

“I know, Jack, how we can do it! Do you remember, in the story of ‘Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves,’ how Ali’s brother’s wife put some tallow on the bottom of the pot she lent him to measure his money with, and how a piece of gold stuck to the tallow? Well, let us take a lump of deer’s fat and press it down all over the bottom of the hole; it will pick up everything there is there.”

“That’s a great idea,” said Jack. “But I’m afraid, if we use fat, we shall have a great deal of trouble in getting rid of the grease afterwards. An old prospector once told me that. And besides, grease floats, and is apt to carry off the gold with it. Isn’t there anything else we can use?”

“Dough,” suggested Percy, thoughtfully.

“H-m. Dough would do perhaps,” said Jack, dubiously, “but I expect it would be about as bad as grease as far as getting the gold out of it again is concerned. Think again.”

“Clay,” said Percy.

“That’s the stuff!” exclaimed Jack, jumping up. “All hands turn loose and hunt for clay!”

I have said before that Jack did not profess to know much about gold-washing. Had his friend, the old prospector, been at hand, he would have told him that the extraction of gold from clay was a process of notorious difficulty and tediousness; but of this fact Jack was ignorant,—very fortunately for him, as it turned out. “A little learning is a dangerous thing,” perhaps, but, strange to say, the littleness of Jack’s learning in the art of gold-washing proved to be most advantageous to him.

The two clay-hunters had not far to seek. On the bare stone beneath the Mushroom Rock they found a fair supply of some white material which they took to be clay—it was soft and sticky, and would therefore suit their purpose excellently,—and gathering all they could find they carried it to the edge of the stream, where Jack, going down again upon his knees, made up a ball as big as his two fists, dropped it into the pot-hole, and kneaded it about all over the bottom until he supposed it must have picked up everything there was down there. He could not see how the process was working, for the water turned “milky” the moment the clay was put into it.

Percy having returned the black sand from the pan to the cup, Jack fished up the clay ball, which being now in a slimy condition concealed anything it might contain, dropped it into the pan, and filled the pan with water. As the clay gradually dissolved, he poured away the muddy water and renewed the supply, repeating the process many times, until at length the soft material had been all washed away and the water remained clear.

Percy, gazing into the pan as Jack held it up, concluded that they had had all their trouble for nothing, for the only result appeared to be a further supply of that ever-intruding black sand,—he was tired of black sand,—but Jack, telling him to have a little patience, poured away nearly all the water, and then, holding the pan almost upright, he, by a dexterous turn of the wrist, set the sand trickling from left to right along the hollow where the bottom of the pan turned up to form the side.

And then, like the passing away of an eclipse of the sun, the black shadow moved to one side, and out came a little patch of yellow gold,—a teaspoonful.