"What do you think?" Frank asked.
"Now that we're so close to the mine I think we may as well go on with our search."
"I was hoping you'd say that. It shouldn't take us more than an hour or so and it isn't dark yet. Besides, we have our flashlights."
"I haven't mine. But one's enough. Go ahead. It shouldn't be hard to find the Lone Tree from here."
Frank turned off the trail. He headed directly toward the old mine workings they had previously visited and from which he remembered having seen the lone pine tree. The snow was deeper than they had expected and they ploughed through drifts up to the waist. They went on, however, and in a short while reached the abandoned mine of their harrowing experience underground. Here they paused.
"The lone tree was over to the right, I think," said Joe.
They peered through the storm. They could see nothing but drifting snow and the dull masses of the rocks. A shift in the wind raised the curtain of storm for a moment and then, like a gloomy sentinel, they saw the tall pine tree, solitary against the bleak background of grey.
"That's it!"
Now that their goal was definitely in sight they felt invigorated, and they hastened on through the snow toward the tree with new vitality. Forgotten for the moment was their weariness and exhaustion, the cold and the snow, in the lure of the gold that they felt sure lay somewhere in the neighborhood of that lonely tree.
Stumbling and plunging through the snow, they reached their goal at last. The tree creaked and swayed in the wind, and as they stood beneath it they saw that they were standing on the verge of a deep pit that seemed to have been scooped out of the earth by giant hands. There were a few ramshackle ruins of old mine buildings near by. The roofs had long since fallen in and the buildings sagged drunkenly. At the far side of the bottom of the pit, clearly discernible against the snow, they saw the wide mouth of a cave.