then, after all his labor, sent it flying out of the pan with one final swirl
of water.

But his blue eyes were shining with desire as he rose to his feet. "Seven," he
muttered aloud, asserting the sum of the specks for which he had toiled so

hard and which he had so wantonly thrown away. "Seven," he repeated, with the
emphasis of one trying to impress a number on his memory.

He stood still a long while, surveying the hill-side. In his eyes was a
curiosity, new-aroused and burning. There was an exultance about his bearing

and a keenness like that of a hunting animal catching the fresh scent of game.
He moved down the stream a few steps and took a second panful of dirt.

Again came the careful washing, the jealous herding of the golden specks, and
the wantonness with which he sent them flying into the stream when he had

counted their number.
"Five," he muttered, and repeated, "five."

He could not forbear another survey of the hill before filling the pan farther
down the stream. His golden herds diminished. " Four, three, two, two, one,"

were his memory-tabulations as he moved down the stream. When but one speck of
gold rewarded his washing, he stopped and built a fire of dry twigs. Into this

he thrust the gold-pan and burned it till it was blue-black. He held up the
pan and examined it critically. Then he nodded approbation. Against such a

color-background he could defy the tiniest yellow speck to elude him.
Still moving down the stream, he panned again. A single speck was his reward.

A third pan contained no gold at all. Not satisfied with this, he panned three
times again, taking his shovels of dirt within a foot of one another. Each pan

proved empty of gold, and the fact, instead of discouraging him, seemed to
give him satisfaction. His elation increased with each barren washing, until

he arose, exclaiming jubilantly:
"If it ain't the real thing, may God knock off my head with sour apples!"

Returning to where he had started operations, he began to pan up the stream.
At first his golden herds increased--increased prodigiously. " Fourteen,

eighteen, twenty-one, twenty-six," ran his memory tabulations. Just above the
pool he struck his richest pan--thirty-five colors.

"Almost enough to save," he remarked regretfully as he allowed the water to
sweep them away.

The sun climbed to the top of the sky. The man worked on. Pan by pan, he went
up the stream, the tally of results steadily decreasing.

"It's just booful, the way it peters out," he exulted when a shovelful of dirt
contained no more than a single speck of gold.

And when no specks at all were found in several pans, he straightened up and
favored the hillside with a confident glance.

"Ah, ha! Mr. Pocket!" he cried out, as though to an auditor hidden somewhere
above him beneath the surface of the slope. "Ah, ha! Mr. Pocket! I'm a-comin',

I'm a-comin', an' I'm shorely gwine to get yer! You heah me, Mr. Pocket? I'm
gwine to get yer as shore as punkins ain't cauliflowers!"

He turned and flung a measuring glance at the sun poised above him in the
azure of the cloudless sky. Then he went down the canyon, following the line

of shovel-holes he had made in filling the pans. He crossed the stream below
the pool and disappeared through the green screen. There was little

opportunity for the spirit of the place to return with its quietude and
repose, for the man's voice, raised in ragtime song, still dominated the

canyon with possession.
After a time, with a greater clashing of steel-shod feet on rock, he returned.

The green screen was tremendously agitated. It surged back and forth in the
throes of a struggle. There was a loud grating and clanging of metal. The

man's voice leaped to a higher pitch and was sharp with imperativeness. A
large body plunged and panted. There was a snapping and ripping and rending,

and amid a shower of falling leaves a horse burst through the screen. On its
back was a pack, and from this trailed broken vines and torn creepers. The

animal gazed with astonished eyes at the scene into which it had been
precipitated, then dropped its head to the grass and began contentedly to

graze. A second horse scrambled into view, slipping once on the mossy rocks
and regaining equilibrium when its hoofs sank into the yielding surface of the

meadow. It was riderless, though on its back was a high-horned Mexican saddle,
scarred and discolored by long usage.

The man brought up the rear. He threw off pack and saddle, with an eye to camp
location, and gave the animals their freedom to graze. He unpacked his food

and got out frying-pan and coffee-pot. He gathered an armful of dry wood, and
with a few stones made a place for his fire.

"My!" he said, "but I've got an appetite. I could scoff iron-filings an'
horseshoe nails an' thank you kindly, ma'am, for a second helpin'."

He straightened up, and, while he reached for matches in the pocket of his
overalls, his eyes travelled across the pool to the side-hill. His fingers had

clutched the match-box, but they relaxed their hold and the hand came out
empty. The man wavered perceptibly. He looked at his preparations for cooking

and he looked at the hill.
"Guess I'll take another whack at her," he concluded, starting to cross the

stream.
"They ain't no sense in it, I know," he mumbled apologetically. "But keepin'

grub back an hour ain't goin' to hurt none, I reckon."
A few feet back from his first line of test-pans he started a second line. The

sun dropped down the western sky, the shadows lengthened, but the man worked
on. He began a third line of test-pans. He was cross-cutting the hillside,

line by line, as he ascended. The centre of each line produced the richest
pans, while the ends came where no colors showed in the pan. And as he

ascended the hillside the lines grew perceptibly shorter. The regularity with
which their length diminished served to indicate that somewhere up the slope

the last line would be so short as to have scarcely length at all, and that
beyond could come only a point. The design was growing into an inverted "V."

The converging sides of this "V" marked the boundaries of the gold-bearing
dirt.

The apex of the "V" was evidently the man's goal. Often he ran his eye along
the converging sides and on up the hill, trying to divine the apex, the point

where the gold-bearing dirt must cease. Here resided "Mr. Pocket"--for so the
man familiarly addressed the imaginary point above him on the slope, crying

out:
"Come down out o' that, Mr. Pocket! Be right smart an' agreeable, an' come

down!"
"All right," he would add later, in a voice resigned to determination. "All

right, Mr. Pocket. It's plain to me I got to come right up an' snatch you out
bald-headed. An' I'll do it! I'll do it!" he would threaten still later.

Each pan he carried down to the water to wash, and as he went higher up the
hill the pans grew richer, until he began to save the gold in an empty

baking-powder can which he carried carelessly in his hip-pocket. So engrossed
was he in his toil that he did not notice the long twilight of oncoming night.

It was not until he tried vainly to see the gold colors in the bottom of the
pan that he realized the passage of time. He straightened up abruptly. An

expression of whimsical wonderment and awe overspread his face as he drawled:
"Gosh darn my buttons! if I didn't plumb forget dinner!"

He stumbled across the stream in the darkness and lighted his long-delayed
fire. Flapjacks and bacon and warmed-over beans constituted his supper. Then

he smoked a pipe by the smouldering coals, listening to the night noises and
watching the moonlightstream through the canyon. After that he unrolled his

bed, took off his heavy shoes, and pulled the blankets up to his chin. His
face showed white in the moonlight, like the face of a corpse. But it was a

corpse that knew its resurrection, for the man rose suddenly on one elbow and
gazed across at his hillside.

"Good night, Mr. Pocket," he called sleepily. "Good night."
He slept through the early gray of morning until the direct rays of the sun

smote his closed eyelids, when he awoke with a start and looked about him
until he had established the continuity of his existence and identified his

present self with the days previously lived.
To dress, he had merely to buckle on his shoes. He glanced at his fireplace

and at his hillside, wavered, but fought down the temptation and started the