He was not sure of all the logic he advanced in convincing her, but she yielded finally, saying:
"Well, I suppose you know best, and, anyhow, littles should always mind."
They clung to the divide for several hours, then descended into the bed of a stream, which they followed until it joined a larger one a couple of miles below, and there, sheltered in a grove of whispering firs, they found Lee's cabin nestling in a narrow, forked valley. Evidently the miner had selected a point on the main creek just below the confluence of the feeders as a place in which to prospect, and Burrell fell to wondering which one of these smaller streams supplied the run of gold.
"There's no one here," said Necia, gleefully. "We've beat them in! We've beat them in!"
They had been walking rapidly since dawn, and, although Burrell's watch showed two o'clock, she refused to halt for lunch, declaring that the others might arrive at any moment; so down they went to the lower end of "No Creek" Lee's location, where Burrell blazed a smooth spot on the down-stream side of a tree and wrote thereon at Necia's dictation. When he had finished, she signed her name, and he witnessed it, then paced off four hundred and forty steps, where he squared a spruce-tree, which she marked: "Lower centre end stake of No. I below discovery. Necia Gale, locator." She was vastly excited and immensely elated at her good-fortune in acquiring the claim next to Lee's, and chattered like a magpie, filling the glades with resounding echoes and dancing about in the bright sunlight that filtered through the branches.
"Now you stake the one below mine," she said. "It's just as good, and maybe better—nobody can tell." But he shook his head.
"I'm not going to stake anything," said he.
"You must!" she cried, quickly, the sparkle dying from her eyes. "You said you would, or I never would have brought you."
"I merely said I would come with you," he corrected. "I did not promise to take up a claim, for I don't think I ought to do so. If I were a civilian, it would be different, but this is government land, and I am a part of the government, as it were. Then, too, in addition to the question of my right to do it, there would be the certainty of making enemies of your people, old "No Creek" and the rest, and I can't afford that now. With you it is different, for you are entitled to this ground. After Lee's friends have shared in his discovery I may change my mind."
All arguments and pleading were in vain; he remained obdurate and insisted on her locating two other claims for herself, one on each of the smaller creeks where they came together above the house.