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Updated: June 6, 2025
It wouldn't look right for the officer to go. I have noticed a pine-tree, the branches of which spread over the top of the rock," and the sergeant pointed to it. "If you will make the men cover the top of the rim-rock with their rifles, Bordeson and I will go up;" and turning to the Swede, "Will you go, Otto?" "I will go anywhere the sergeant does," came his gallant reply.
If I had been hot and wet below in the thicket I wondered what I grew on the last steps of this ridge. Yet even the toil and the pain held a keen pleasure. I did not analyze my feelings then, but it was good to be there. The rim-rock came out to a point above me, seeming unscalable, all grown over with brush and lichen, and stunted spruce.
But just so often as he allowed his imagination rein, just so often he came back to earth doubly heavy-hearted, for the chance that she would ever share his pleasure in these things seemed to grow more remote as the days went by. Bruce had built himself a shelter at the end of his trap-line that consisted merely of poles and pine boughs leaned against a rim-rock.
As we passed the first of the rustlers' corrals, he called my attention to them. "Go take a look," said he. "We only got those fellows out of here two years ago." I rode over. At this point the rim-rock broke to admit the ingress of a ravine into the main canon. Riding a short distance up the ravine, I could see that it ended abruptly in a perpendicular cliff.
He clambered up to the rim, dripping with sweat at every step, and all that day, while the heat waves blazed and shimmered, he prospected the face of the rim-rock. The hot stones burned his hands, he fought his way through thorns and catclaws and climbed around yuccas and spiny cactus; but at the end of the long day, when he dragged back to camp, he had found nothing but barren holes.
They were then in the narrow neck which was called the handle of the Devil's Frying-pan and they would have ridden unsuspectingly into the very Pan itself, had not the Native Son's quick eyes caught a movement on the rim-rock across the bare, rock-bottomed basin. He spoke to luck about it, and luck levelled his field glasses and glimpsed a skulking form up there.
"Don't you have nothin' to do with it, Daylight. It's a blamed rotten sell. They're just going through the motions of a strike. Harper and Ladue's behind it, and Carmack's the stool-pigeon. Whoever heard of mining a moose-pasture half a mile between rim-rock and God alone knows how far to bed-rock!" Daylight nodded sympathetically, and considered for a space.
"Take your choice, then, of the steps or the pine-tree," continued the Virginian; and after a rather short but sharp calculation the Swede declared for the tree, although both were death if the Indians were on the rim-rock. He immediately began sidling along the rock to the tree, and slowly commenced the ascent. The sergeant took a few steps up the cutting, holding on by the rope.
Here the sedimentary rim-rock lay open as a book and as he followed along its face he found hole after hole pecked into one copper-stained stratum. It was the same broad stratum of quartzite which, on coming to the creek, had dipped down into Bunker's claim; and now Denver knew that others beside himself thought well of that mineral-bearing vein.
As the column approached the precipitous rim-rock the officer halted, had the horses assembled in a side canon, putting Corporal Thornton in charge.
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