The crackling, scraping 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 space 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 space 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 prickly bushes.
Then once more they stopped suddenly. Oliver knew that in the short space 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 glasses on the cabin down below.