Part 28 (1/2)

Thus wearisomely engaged he crawled into a depression three feet deep in the earth beneath him. This allowed him to sit erect for the first time in minutes, and he availed himself of the chance, industriously mopping his brow.

Now, Oliver Drew was not a miner, but he was a son of the outdoor West and knew at once that he was seated in an ancient prospect hole. About the excavation were piled the dirt and stones that had been shovelled out.

He speculated over it. For all he knew, it might date back to the fascinating days of '49. A great forest of pines might have stood here then. Or maybe the pines had been burned away, and a forest of gigantic oaks had followed the conifers, to rear themselves majestically above the pigmies that delved, oftimes impotently, for the glittering yellow treasure at their roots. Or, again, the prospect hole might have been dug years later, after the oaks had disappeared and the chaparral had claimed the land. There was no way of telling, for every decade or so forest fires swept the country almost clean, and some new growth superseded the old in Nature's endless cycle.

Fifty feet farther on he plopped into a second prospect hole, and a little beyond that he found a third.

He noted now that in all cases no chaparral grew up through the muck that had been thrown out. This would seem to signify that the work had been done in recent years, while the bushes that now claimed the land still grew there. He found a fourth hole soon, and near it were manzanita stumps, the tops of which had been cut off with an ax.

This settled it. While the soil might show evidences of the work of man for an interminable length of time, the roots of the lopped-off manzanitas would rot in a decade, perhaps, and freezing weather would loosen the stumps from their moorings. But this wood was still sound.

The prospecting had been done not many years before. And who had been prospecting thus on patented land?

When he had wormed his way to the crest of a hill he had pa.s.sed about twenty of these shallow holes. Now, at the top, the earth had been literally gophered. The workings here looked newer still; and presently he came upon evidence that proved work had been done not longer than a year before, for dry leaves still clung to the tops of manzanita bushes that had been chopped off and pitched to one side.

It has been stated that he was not a miner. Still, having been born and raised in a mining country, he knew something of the geological formations in which gold ordinarily is found. He was in a gold producing country now, yet the specimens that he picked up near the prospect holes proved that only a rank tenderfoot would have searched so persistently in this locality.

He picked up a bit of white substance and gave it study. It resembled lithia. The water of his spring contained a trace of lithium salts, according to the a.n.a.lysis furnished him by the State Agricultural College, to which he had mailed a sample. He pocketed the specimen for future reference.

As he sat on the edge of this hole, with his feet in it, he heard a rustling in the bushes close at hand. At first he thought it might be caused by a jackrabbit; but soon it became certain that some heavier, larger body was making its way slowly through the chaparral.

A coyote? A bobcat? A deer?

He carried no gun today, and the swift thought of a mountain lion was a bit unpleasant.

He quickly slid from his seat and stretched himself on the ground in the shallow excavation. Oliver was an ardent student of nature, and he liked nothing better than secretly to watch some wild thing as it moved about it its customary routine, unconscious of the gaze of human eyes. Once he had hidden in wild grapevines and watched a skunk searching for bugs along a creekbed, until suddenly the moist bank crumbled beneath him, and he fell, and--But what followed is what might be called an unsavory story.

The crackling, sc.r.a.ping sounds drew nearer, but whatever was making them was not moving directly toward him. They ceased abruptly, and then he knew that the man or animal had reached the open s.p.a.ce in the brush in which the prospect holes were situated.

As the noises were not continued, he began raising himself slowly, until he was able to look over the edge of the hole.

It was not a browsing deer nor a hunting coyote upon which he gazed. A squat, dark man, with chaps and spurs and Stetson, was making his way across the open s.p.a.ce to the continuation of the chaparral beyond it.

His eyes were mere slits, black, Mongolic.

He was Digger Foss, the half-white, right-hand man of Adam Selden.

The progress of the gunman was not stealthy, for undoubtedly he considered himself particularly safe from observation up here in the wilderness of chaparral. He slouched bow-leggedly across the break in the thicket, and dropped to hands and knees when he reached the edge of it. He disappeared in the chaparral.

The general direction that he was pursuing was straight toward Oliver's cabin. Oliver lay quite still and listened to the renewed sounds of his progress through the p.r.i.c.kly bushes.

Then once more they stopped suddenly. Oliver knew that in the short s.p.a.ce of time elapsed Digger Foss could not have crawled beyond the reach of his hearing. He had paused again.

For perhaps five minutes he listened, but could hear no further sounds.

Then from not far distant there came the familiar clatter of a dry pine cone in the manzanita tops.

A moment more and Oliver was smiling grimly. For Foss had suddenly appeared above the tops of the chaparral. He was climbing a giant digger pine, which only a short time before Oliver had investigated as the possible home of the bees he was striving to find. There in plain sight the halfbreed was climbing like a bear from limb to limb, keeping the trunk of the tree between his chunky body and the cabin in the valley.

Presently he settled astride a horizontal bough on Oliver's side, his back toward the watcher. He adjusted himself as comfortably as possible, and then there appeared in his hands a pair of binoculars. Leaning around the tree trunk, screened by the digger pine's long, smoke-coloured needles, he focused the gla.s.ses on the cabin down below.