He had a strange audience, the greedy white-fanged beasts that slunk away at the first strains of the unwonted sound, stole back, yet moved uneasily away again, the little fat, inquisitive prairie dogs that popped out of their burrows and sat up to listen, the circling nighthawks that wheeled and called overhead. Hour after hour he played, but whenever he paused the hungry circle drew in about him and he was forced to raise his aching arm and ply his bow again. The first hint of dawn was brightening the sky when the creatures of the night began to slip away, and Felix, laying down his violin, suddenly laughed aloud.
"I wish that Granny Fullerton, who thought that it wasn't quite safe for us to live on the Windy Hill," he said, "I wish that she could see me now!"
Then he lay down, pillowed his head upon his arm, and fell so fast asleep that, as he said afterward, "a whole tribe of Indians could have ridden over him and he would never have moved."
It was, indeed, horse's feet that aroused him, but not, by good fortune, the unshod hoofs of Indian ponies. A band of men was riding toward him from the westward, hard, grizzled men, weather-beaten and toil-worn beyond anything Felix had ever seen.
"We met your party back yonder," said their leader. "They asked us to look out for you as we went by. Glad to see the Indians haven't got you yet."
"Oh!" exclaimed Felix, sitting up and rubbing his eyes, "Have you—have you been in California?"
The man nodded. He drew out of his pocket a greasy little buckskin bag, opened the strings, and poured a stream of something yellow into the boy's hand.
"Ever see gold dust before?" he asked.
It was Felix's first sight of the odd, flattened flakes of metal that shine dully in your hand, that are no two alike, so that you can turn them over and over, always seeing different shapes and sizes, different gleams and lights upon their changing surfaces.
"There's a lot of it back there where we've been," the man said, grinning slowly as he saw Felix's excited face. "We left it there for you and those like you."