Hugh Edwards laughed, and, with his face lifted to the mountain heights that towered above them, squared his shoulders and drew a long deep breath.
“I haven’t had such a sleep since I can remember. As for breakfast, well, if I eat like this every day, I will exhaust my supplies before I even learn to know gold when I see it. I feel as if I could move that hill over there into the cañon.”
Bob chuckled.
“You’ll find you’ve got to move a lot of it, son, before you make enough at this gold-huntin’ game to buy your grub.”
“That’s the trouble with prospectin’ in this here Cañada del Oro country,” said Thad. “The harder you work the more you eat, and the more you eat the harder you got to work. Come on, let’s get a-goin’.”
For several hours the old Pardners labored with their pupil beside the creek, then, with hearty assurance of further help from time to time as he made progress, they left him and went to their own little mine, some five hundred yards down the cañon.
The afternoon was nearly gone when Edwards, who was kneeling over the gravel and sand in his pan at the edge of the stream, looked up.
On a bowlder, not more than five steps from the amateur prospector, sat an Indian.
With an exclamation, the white man sprang to his feet.
The Indian did not move. Dressed as he was in the wild fashion of his fathers and with his primitive bow and arrows, he seemed more like some sculptured bit of the past than a creature of living flesh.