"No? Well, that's too bad, Eben. I always wanted to have a look at your find; I know a little about the subject, and I might have saved you trouble and time. I don't like to believe you've thrown away these two years."
Eben lifted his eyes again to the cliff. "Kingdom Come!" he said once more. "But where was you?"
"Up there, at the top. You see, Eben,—don't you?—what that landslide did for me. That's it; that streak of mineral, shining up there, is my lost prospect. A dynamite blast couldn't have been surer. It opened my mine."
"'Pears that erway," Eben answered slowly, "an' I 'low that ther vein shows up all o' twelve feet. But," and his look returned to Forrest, "'pears, too, like ther Almighty teched off that ther blast er little too quick."
"Oh, I'm all right. It's only a broken bone or two; nothing a surgeon can't fix. I came down in that last layer of soft earth, and Miss Hunter," he steadied his voice, "found me and helped me out."
But if Forrest's light mention of his injuries had deceived Eben, the teacher's manner quickly convinced him there was little time to waste. She brought the horse from the alders, and despatched the settler with her saddle cup to fill at the stream which flowed through the gorge. And when Paul had taken a long draught, and she had covered his chilled shoulders with her raincoat, which she had carried strapped behind the saddle, she found in one of the pockets a pencil, with which, on the blank page of a letter, she wrote a telegram to the Judge.
Eben, who was converting his blanket into a sling for Forrest's injured limb, promised to take the message straight to Yelm Station, and she could trust Judge Kingsley to send a surgeon, the best in Olympia, without delay. But her heart sank at the long and unavoidable interval he must spend on the road. "Dear God," she cried, under her breath, "hurry them; hurry them; let him come in time."
At last the saddle sling was ready, and Myers tucked the folded paper carefully into his pocket, weighing it down with his small prospector's mallet and a ragged plug of tobacco. Forrest's eyes moved from the mineral ledge and rested an instant on the place where the tower had stood. "You may meet a runaway horse somewhere on the trail, Eben," he said. "If you do, don't try to take the bridle close under the bit. He has been taught a mean trick."
"Oh," said Alice, "you mean Sir Donald. I had forgotten. Mr. Myers, you came down-stream. Did you see Mr. Stratton near the ford?"
"Did I see him?" Eben smiled his wide smile. "Well, no. Ef I had, I jedge I'd er took him."