“Could you go back over the route you took this afternoon?” Larry asked.
“I’m afraid I couldn’t do even that much.”
“Was it higher up the mountain than this—or lower down?”
Purdick put his face in his hands and tried to think, and the harder he tried the more confusing the recollections—or no recollections—became.
“I don’t know,” he said at length. “You know we all separated in the afternoon, agreeing to meet here. I remember climbing two or three gulches, and working around one place where there was a steep slope and a pile of broken rock. At the top of the slope, as I recall it, there was a cliff. I remember that, because I had half a mind to climb up to the cliff to find out what kind of rock it was. But the slope was pretty steep and I didn’t.”
“And was that where you picked up this piece of quartz?” Dick asked.
Purdick made helpless motions with his hands.
“Don’t ask me,” he protested. “The more I try to remember, the worse off I get.”
“Well,” Larry put in, with a copying of Dick’s grim smile, “you’ll always have it to tell that you once discovered a gold mine—a real bonanza, at that. Let’s turn in and hope that you may dream out the place. I guess that’s about the only hope there is left.”
A few minutes later they had made their simple preparations for the night. Though they had long since concluded that the three would-be mine jumpers had given up the chase, they still kept up the habit they had formed of dividing the night into three watches, more because it was a habit than for any imaginable danger that might threaten them or their belongings.