counterpane.

“Mamma, what’s the matter? Say something! Look at me!” he cried. But the gray eyes that always beamed upon him with such glad welcome did not open, and the parted lips were unresponsive to his own. There was no movement of her chest to tell him that she even breathed.

A fearful chill struck to his heart. What if she was dying—dead! Other boys’ mothers sometimes died, he knew, but his mother—his mother! He tugged gently at one long, silken braid of hair that lay in his grimy hand like a golden rope, calling her in a voice that shook with fright.

The cry penetrated her dulled senses. It brought her back from the borderland of that far country into which she had almost slipped. Slowly, painfully, with the last faint remnant of her will power, she tried to speak—to answer that beloved, boyish voice.

“My—little boy——” The words came thickly, and her lips did not seem to move.

But it was her voice; she had spoken; she was not dead! He hugged her hard in wild ecstasy and relief.

“I’m glad—you came. I—can’t stay—long. I’ve had—such hopes—for you—little boy. I’ve dreamed—such dreams—for you—I wanted to see—them all come true. If I can—I’ll help you—from—the other side. There’s so much—more I want to say—if only—I had known—— Oh, Bruce—my—li—ttle boy——” Her voice ended in a breath, and stopped.

“Looks like you’d say somethin’ about them pancakes instead of settin’ there shovelin’.”

“Haven’t I told you regular every morning for six months that they was great pancakes? Couldn’t you let me off for once?”

The two partners glared at each other across the clumsy table of hewn pine. They looked like two wild men, as black eyes flashed anger, even hate, into black eyes. Their hair was long and uneven, their features disguised by black beards of many weeks’ growth. Their miners’ boots were but ludicrous remnants tied on with buckskin thongs. Their clothes hung in rags, and they ate with the animal-like haste and carelessness of those who live alone.

The smaller of the two men rose abruptly, and, with a vicious kick at the box upon which he had been sitting, landed it halfway across the room. His cheeks and nose were pallid above his beard, his thin nostrils dilated, and his hand shook as he reached for his rifle in the gun rack made of deer horns nailed above the kitchen door. He was slender and wiry of build, quick and nervous in his movements, yet they were almost noiseless, and he walked with the padded soft-footedness of the preying animal.

Bruce Burt lounged to the cabin door and looked after “Slim” Naudain as he went to the river. Then he stepped outside, stooping to avoid striking his head. He leaned his broad shoulder against the door jamb and watched “Slim” bail the leaky boat and untie it from the willows. While he filled and lighted his pipe, Bruce’s eyes followed his partner as he seated himself upon the rotten thwart and shoved into the river with home-made oars that were little more than paddles. The river caught him with the strength of a hundred eager hands, and whirled him, paddling like a madman, broadside to the current. It bore him swiftly to the roaring white rapids some fifty yards below, and the fire died in Bruce’s pipe as, breathless, he watched the bobbing boat.

“Slim’ll cross in that water-coffin once too often,” he muttered, and Bruce himself was the best boatman the length of the dangerous river.

There were times when he felt that he almost hated Slim Naudain, and this was one of them, yet fine lines of anxiety drew about his eyes as he watched the first lolling tongue of the rapids reach for the tiny boat. If it filled, Slim was gone, for no human being could swim in the roaring, white stretch where the great, green river reared, curled back, and broke into iridescent foam. The boat went out of sight, rose, bobbed for an instant on a crest, then disappeared.

Bruce said finally, in relief:

“He’s made it again.”

He watched Slim make a noose in the painter, throw it over a bowlder, wipe the water from his rifle with his shirt sleeve, and start to scramble up the steep mountainside.

“The runt of something good—that feller,” Bruce added, with somber eyes. “I ought to pull out of here. It’s no use, we can’t hit it off any more.”

He closed the cabin door against thieving pack rats, and went down to the river, where his old-fashioned California rocker stood at the water’s edge. He started to work, still thinking of Slim.

Invariably he injected the same comment into his speculations regarding his partner: “The runt of something good.” It was the “something good” in Slim, the ear-marks of good breeding, and the peculiar fascination of blue blood run riot, which had first attracted him in Meadows, the mountain town one hundred and fifty miles above. This prospecting trip had been Bruce’s own proposal, and he tried to remember this when the friction was greatest.

Slim, however, had jumped at his suggestion that they build a barge and work the small sand bars along the river which were enriched with fine gold from some mysterious source above by each high water. They were to labor together and share and share alike. This was understood between them before they left Meadows, but the plan did not work out because Slim failed to do his part. Save for an occasional day of desultory work, he spent his time in the mountains, killing game for which they had no use, trapping animals whose pelts were worthless during the summer months. He seemed to kill for the pleasure he found in killing. Protests from Bruce were useless, and this wanton slaughter added day by day to the dislike he felt for his partner, to the resentment which now was ever smoldering in his heart.

Bruce wondered often at his own self-control. He carried scars of knife and bullet which bore mute testimony to the fact that with his childhood he had not outgrown his quick and violent temper. In mining camps, from Mexico to the Stikine and Alaska in the North, he was known as a “scrapper,” with any weapon of his opponent’s choice.

Perhaps it was because he could have throttled Slim with his thumb and finger, have shaken the life out of him with one hand, that Bruce forbore; perhaps it was because he saw in Slim’s erratic, surly moods a something not quite normal, a something which made him sometimes wonder if his partner was well balanced. At any rate, he bore his shirking, his insults, and his deliberate selfishness with a patience that would have made his old companions stare.

The bar of sand and gravel upon which their cabin stood, and where Bruce now was working, was half a mile in width and a mile and a half or so in length. He had followed a pay streak into the bank, timbering the tunnel as he went, and he wheeled his dirt from this tunnel to his rocker in a crude wheelbarrow of his own make.

He filled his gold pan from the wheelbarrow, and dumped it into the grizzly, taking from each pan the brightest-colored pebble he could find to place on the pile with others so that when the day’s work was done he could tell how many pans he had washed and so form some idea as to how the dirt was running per cubic yard.

His dipper was a ten-pound lard can with a handle ingeniously attached, and as he dipped water from the river into the grizzly, the steady, mechanical motion of the rocker and dipper had the regularity of a machine. If he touched the dirt with so much as his finger tips he washed them carefully over the grizzly lest some tiny particle be lost. Bruce was as good a rocker as a