“Enter mouth cañon. Go straight about five hundred yards. Climb dead pine-tree leaning against east bank. Straight up to top of ridge. Follow ledge to cliff. Look along bottom of cliff.” And that was all.
Farley put the paper again in his pocket and turned north along the lake shore. He had perhaps two miles and a half, maybe three miles, to go, and he was growing anxious to see this mine which his partner had discovered.
It was a simple matter to follow the trail, a natural path at the lake’s edge, kept open by the deer and other woodland animals that came down to drink or browse upon the long grass here. And before he had covered more than half of the two miles he saw the “big white rock” which Johnny had marked for him, close to the water, rising straight up from the level floor of the valley.
Here, with a glance at his map to make sure that he was right, he turned eastward, counting his steps. He had stepped off one hundred and twenty-five when he stopped, frowning. For nowhere were the mountains far from the lake, and already he had entered a cañon. And Johnny’s map had said two hundred paces.
“Johnny wouldn’t make a mistake like that,” he told himself.
And, again counting, he moved on and into the cañon until he had counted another seventy-five paces. Then he understood.
Here, cut into the wall of this cañon, was a second, a narrower, steeper-walled ravine, evidently the one Johnny had had in mind when he said, “Enter mouth of cañon.” The general trend of this one was north and south. He pushed on into it, estimating roughly the five hundred yards.
And then, with a little quickening of the pulses, he saw the dead pine-tree. It had fallen, and now, with its roots half torn out of the rocky soil, lay sprawled against the eastern bank of the cañon at an angle of about forty-five degrees. The banks here were so steep, rising fifty feet above him, that a man would have had a hard time climbing them. But the fallen tree was at once a pointer to the Cup of Gold and a ladder to reach it.
Up on the top of the bank he found the ridge, and working his way slowly along that he came to the long line of cliffs which standing above made the side of the mountain look like a giant’s stairway. And now, his heart beating with the exertion of the struggle upward and with the eagerness of quickened anticipation which comes to the miner at a time like this, no matter what face the day wears, he stopped and let his eyes rove along the bottom of the cliff.
And in a moment he saw what he looked for, and hurried forward. There were the marks of a pick in the crumbling bank, and there——