"You boys may come along here pretty sudden, some time, and if you don't find Dutch Flat you will stray off into the mountains and get lost; so I will just blaze the way for you."
As Mr. Banta spoke he seized a handful of the branches of an evergreen and pulled them partly off, so that they just hung by the bark.
"Now, whenever you see that, you are on the right road," said he; "but if you don't see it, you had better turn back and search for a blaze until you find it."
For once the boys did not pay much attention to Mr. Banta's stories, for their minds were fully occupied with their own thoughts. At last—it did not seem to them that they had ridden a mile—the man with the bell-mare sung out "Here we are!" and led the way into a smooth, grassy plain which seemed out of place there in the mountains, and to which there did not appear to be any outlet except the one by which they had entered it. It was surrounded by the loftiest peaks on all sides except one, and there the plain was bounded by a precipitous ravine which was so deep that the bottom could not be seen from the top. Near the middle of the plain was a little brook, placed most conveniently for "washing" their finds, which bubbled merrily over the stones before it plunged into the abyss before spoken of; and close on the other side were the ruins of the mine—a strong windlass, which had hauled up fifty thousand dollars' worth of gold—and the rope that was fast to the bucket, or rather to the fragments of it, for the bucket itself had fallen to pieces from the effects of the weather, and lay in ruins on the ground. Still farther away stood the lean-to—firmly built, of course, but not strong enough to stand the fury of the winter's storms. Taken altogether, a miner could not have selected a more fitting camp, or one better calculated to banish all symptoms of homesickness while they were pulling out the gold from the earth below. Mr. Banta kept a close watch on the boys, and saw the pleased expression that came upon their faces.
"I know it looks splendid now, but it will not look so before long," said he, with a knowing shake of his head. "Now, boys, let us get to work. We want to get through here, so as to get back to Dutch Flat to-night."
The miners unsaddled their horses, grabbed their axes and spades, and set in manfully to make the "mine all right," so that the boys could go to work at it without delay. Some repaired the lean-to, others laboriously cleared the mouth of the pit from the grass and brush which had accumulated there, and still another brought from the boys' pack the new bucket and rope which they expected would last just about long enough for one of them to go down and up—and they were positive that the boy would come up a great deal faster than he went down. The boys did not find anything to do but to get dinner, and they were rather proud of the skill with which the viands were served up.
"I didn't know you boys could do cooking like this," said Mr. Banta, as he seated himself on the grass and looked over the table—a blanket spread out to serve in lieu of a cloth. "If the cooking was all you had to contend with you could live like fighting-cocks as long as you stay here."
"We had hardly enough money to pay for a housekeeper while we were in St. Louis, and so we had all this work to do ourselves," said Julian. "You must give Jack the credit for this. We kept bachelor's hall while we were at home. He cooked, and I swept out and helped wash the dishes."
"Now, boys," said Mr. Banta, after he had finished his pipe, "I guess we have Julian and Jack all ready to go to work whenever they feel like it. Look over your work, and see if there is anything you have missed, and then we will go back to Dutch Flat. I tell you, I hate to leave you up here in this sort of a way."
"You need not be," said Jack. "If you will come up here in two weeks from now, we will have some gold-dust to show you."