It never could be found out what happened to Schuster, or what he did, during the next ten hours. We pick him up again in a saloon on the waterfront about noon the next day, with thirty dollars in his pocket and God knows what disorderly notions in his crazed wits. At this time he was sober as far as the alcohol went. It might be supposed that now would have been the time for reflection and repentance and return to home and respectability. Return home! Not much! Schuster had began to wonder what kind of an ass he had been to have walked the floor of a department-store for the last score of years. Something was boiling in his veins. B-r-r-r! Let 'em all stand far from him now.
That day he left San Francisco and rode the blind baggage as far as Colfax on the Overland. He chose Colfax because he saw the name chalked on a freight car at the Oakland mole. At Colfax, within three hours after his arrival, he fought with a restaurant man over the question of a broken saucer, and the same evening was told to leave the town by the sheriff.
Out of Colfax, some twenty-eight miles into the mountains, are placer gold mines, having for headquarters a one-street town called Iowa Hill. Schuster went over to the Hill the same day on the stage. The stage got in at night and pulled up in front of the postoffice. Schuster went into the postoffice, which was also a Wells-Fargo office, a candy store, a drug store, a cigar store, and a lounging-room, and asked about hotels.
Only the postmaster was in at that time, but as Schuster leaned across the counter, talking to him, a young man came in, with a huge spur on his left boot-heel. He and the postmaster nodded, and the young man slid an oblong object about the size of a brick across the counter. The object was wrapped in newspaper and seemed altogether too heavy for anything but metal—metal of the precious kind, for example.
"He?" answered the postmaster to Schuster, when the young man had gone. "He's the superintendent of the Little Bear mine on the other side of the American River, about three miles by the trail."
For the next week Schuster set himself to work to solve the problem of how a man might obtain a shotgun in the vicinity of Iowa Hill without the fact being remembered afterward and the man identified. It seemed good to him after a while to steal the gun from a couple of Chinamen who were washing gravel along the banks of the American River about two miles below the Little Bear. For two days he lay in the tarweed and witch hazel, on the side of the canyon overlooking the cabin, noted the time when both Chinamen were sufficiently far away, and stole the gun, together with a saw and a handful of cartridges loaded with buckshot. Within the next week he sawed off the gun-barrels sufficiently short, experimented once or twice with the buckshot, and found occasion to reconnoiter every step of the trail that led from the Little Bear to Iowa Hill. Also, he found out at the bar of the hotel at the Hill that the superintendent of the Little Bear amalgamated and reported the cleanup on Sundays. When he had made sure of this Schuster was seen no more about that little one-street mining town.
"He says it's Sunday," said Paul Schuster to himself; "but that's why it's probably Saturday or Monday. He ain't going to have the town know when he brings the brick over. It might even be Friday. I'll make it a four-night watch."
There is a nasty bit on the trail from the Little Bear to the Hill, steep as a staircase, narrow as a rabbit-run, and overhung with manzanita. The place is trumpet-mouthed in shape, and sound carries far. So, on the second night of his watch, Schuster could at last plainly hear the certain sounds that he had been waiting for—sounds that jarred sharply on the prolonged roll of the Morning Star stamps, a quarter of a mile beyond the canyon. The sounds were those of a horse threshing through the gravel and shallow water of the ford in the river just below. He heard the horse grunt as he took the slope of the nearer bank, and the voice of his rider speaking to him came distinctly to his ears. Then silence for one—two—three minutes, while the stamp mill at the Morning Star purred and rumbled unceasingly and Schuster's heart pumped thickly in his throat. Then a blackness blacker than that of the night heaved suddenly against the grey of "the sky, close in upon him, and a pebble clicked beneath a shod hoof.
"Pull up!" Schuster was in the midst of the trail, his cheek caressing the varnished stock.
"Whoa! Steady there! What in hell——"