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He stood and studied the creek-bed and its banks, and decided that the flow of water came from the right. He reflected awhile, rubbing his nose and cheeks, then skirted to the left, stepping gingerly and testing the footing for each step. Once clear of the danger, he took a fresh chew of tobacco and swung along at his four-mile gait.
One morning the prospector noticed it, and immediately explored the creek clear to its source a spurt of water springing from the roof of a grotto in the cliff. Such a supply, evidently from the rocky heart of the range itself, would be inexhaustible. A week later he awoke to find the creek-bed dry save in a few depressions among the rocks. He again visited the grotto.
Horse-racing seemed to be as popular a sport in the valley as dancing. Indeed, men came riding in who had not come to the dance. The dry creek-bed where the horses would run had no road leading to it, so that all vehicles came to Little Lost and remained there while the passengers continued on foot to the races.
All about Smoke men tripped and fell, and several times he pitched forward himself, jarringly, on hands and knees. Once, Big Olaf fell so immediately in front of him as to bring him down on top. The upper center-stake was driven by the edge of the bank, and down the bank the racers plunged, across the frozen creek-bed, and up the other side.
And as the days went by he stored his mind with miscellaneous data concerning the nature of the various placer deposits and the lay of the land, against the summer when the thawed surface and the running water would permit him to follow a trace from creek-bed to side-slope and source. Corliss was a good employer, paid well, and considered it his right to work men as he worked himself.
I went quietly back to the river-bed, and found that most of the fellows had dismounted and were "cinching" up their saddles. We were to try to "head" the cattle, and so prevent them from breaking out of the field, up the hillside, and getting away into the mountains again, where we should have had to leave them. The creek-bed was low, and afforded us good cover for three parts of the way.
Occasionally, too, a stray whisper of breeze stole along the creek-bed and rustled the beeches, or stirred in the broad, fanlike leaves of the "cucumber trees." A great block of sandstone, to whose summit a man standing in his saddle could scarcely reach his fingertips, towered above the stream, with a gnarled scrub oak clinging tenaciously to its apex.
But she had by instinct a wary defensiveness, and she was on constant guard. "Alexander," said Halloway one day when they were walking together along the creek-bed between the dark, waxy masses of the rhododendron, "Hit strikes me right forceable, thet fer a gal thet didn't hev no time of day fer any man, ye've done swung round mighty suddent.
The distance was nearly five hundred yards, and the bullet went wide of its mark. Nevertheless, it saved the native's life. The great cat remembered this same far-off explosion from another day, in a dry creek-bed of months before, and the sing of the bullet was a remembered thing, too. Although it would speedily return to her, her courage fled and she turned and faced into the bamboos.
The tracks he had been following swung sharp to the right; the wheel-marks came from the left, crossed the creek-bed and continued to the right.
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