Then he stepped to the tree where his rifle stood and called to Thor as he did always when he left the dog in camp: "Watch, Thor! Watch, sir."
It was not always that he carried his rifle. He explained, while he looked to her to come with him.
"We'll talk things over; but in any case it's clear that we're getting short of food. Maybe, while we talk, we can bring down something in the way of provisions with a lucky shot."
Willing enough was she to-day for talk; at least to listen to whatever he might say. She followed, stopping only to stoop and pat old Thor's head; already she counted the faithful brute a friend. Thor tried to lick her hand; for already Thor, like Thor's master, had bestowed an abiding love to the first true girl who had ever intimately entered the life of either. Thor wanted to follow; he whined and looked anxious, ears pricked forward, tail wagging.
"Down, Thor," commanded Standing, if only because already he had issued his command. "You watch camp for us; watch, Thor."
Thor dropped down at the entrance of Lynette's grotto; for one instant his great head lay between his forepaws; then he jerked it up again so that he might watch them as they went through the thickets to the creek.
Standing carried a cup with him. When they came to the waterfall leaping down a twenty-foot rocky spillway, glassily clear, making a pigmy thunder in the narrow-walled ravine, he rinsed and filled his cup and gave it to Lynette. She drank. Thereafter, and with no further rinsing, he drank. She sat upon a big rock, leaning back against a leaning tree trunk; he sat down close enough to her to allow of words carrying above the thunder of the falling waters and filled his after-lunch pipe.
"I know as much as you do of the place to find the gold!" she told him again. "And I, though a girl, have as much interest in a fortune to be made as any man can have. That's fair warning to you, Bruce Standing!"
He laughed carelessly. Then he said: