"Hallo, there! Hallo!" cried Steve as soon as his eyes fell upon the man and his rocker; but Steve's voice was so pitiably weak and small in a country where mud-banks are built like mountains, that it did not even wake an echo.
"Come along, Steve; it's no good shouting for half an hour yet. Look out for the prickly pears!" said Ned, and so saying he plunged into a little ravine, whose beggarly barrenness cried aloud to winter to come and hide it from the face of the sun.
"It's all very well to tell a man to look out for them," answered Steve in the peevish voice of sickness, "but there is nothing else to step on. It's all thorns and sharp stones in this confounded country."
"Never mind, stick to it, old chap."
"Just what I am doing, worse luck to it," muttered Steve, trying to tear himself away from a patch of little cacti upon which he had inadvertently sat down.
Ned turned and saw Steve's plight, and the white woe-begone face of his comrade only heightened the comedy of the position. So that there, at the last gasp, sick and worn-out, these two failures, with their stomachs empty and their soles full of thorns, stood and laughed until the tears rolled down their cheeks.
From the next step in the bench which led to the river Ned joined his deep bass to Steve's, and together they shouted their loudest to attract the man's attention. In vain. Whoever he was the man worked on, bending over his rocker, with the gold fever at his heart and the boom of the great river in his ears.
"It's no good, we must go right down to him," said Ned; and five minutes later he and Steve stood together upon the bar on which the man was at work. But so intent was he upon his rocking, or so silent was the approach of his visitors' bare and bleeding feet over the great boulders, that it was not until Ned's shadow fell upon him that the gold-worker was aware of a stranger's presence.
Then quick as thought he sprang to his feet, snatching up a Winchester as he did so, and covering his men with it before he had time to look into their faces.
"Stand off!" he roared, "or by 'Mity I'll let light through you!" and for the moment it seemed a mere toss-up whether he would shoot or not. But the men he spoke to were as reckless of life as he was. Hardship had taught them that a human life is not such a wonderfully big stake as the fat townsmen seem to think.