Sometimes in dangerous spots where shale slides threatened to prove unstable, his lean, grim face and blue-gray eyes appeared apprehensive, and he braced his great shoulders against one of the bulging packs to assist a sweating, straining animal. After one of these perilous tracts he stopped beside the burros, pushed the stained white Stetson to the back of his head, exposing a white forehead which had been protected from the sun, and ran the sleeve of his blue-flannel 23 shirt across his face from brow to chin to wipe away the moisture.

“Hell’s got no worse roads than this!” he exclaimed. “Next time anybody talks me into takin’ a cut-off over a spring trail to save a day and a half’s time, him and me’ll have an argument!”

Ahead, and at the moment inspecting a knot in a diamond hitch, the other man grinned, then straightened up, and, shading his eyes from the sun with his hat, looked off into the distance. He was younger than his partner, whose hair was grizzled to a badger gray, but no less determined and self-reliant in appearance. He did not look his thirty years, while the other man looked more than his forty-eight.

“Well, Bill,” he said slowly, “it seems to me if we can get through at all we’ve saved a day and a half. By the way, come up here.”

The grizzled prospector walked up until he stood abreast, and from the little rise stared ahead.

“Isn’t that it?” asked the younger man. “Over there––through the gap; just down below that spike with a snow cap.” He stretched out a long, muscular arm, and his companion edged up to it and sighted along its length and 24 over the index finger as if it were the barrel of a rifle, and stared, scowling, at the distant maze of mountain and sky that seemed upended from the green of the forests below.

“Say, I believe you’re right, Dick!” he exclaimed. “I believe you are. Let’s hustle along to the top of this divide, and then we’ll know for sure.”

They resumed their progress, to halt at the top, where there was abruptly opened below them a far-flung panorama of white and gray and purple, stretched out in prodigality from sky line to sky line.

“Well, there she is, Dick,” asserted the elder man. “That yellow, cross-shaped mark up there on the side of the peak. I kept tellin’ you to keep patient and we’d get there after a while.”

His partner did not reply to the inconsistency of this argument, but stood looking at the landmark as if dreaming of all it represented.

“That is it, undoubtedly,” he said, as if to himself. “The Croix d’Or. I suppose that’s why the old Frenchman who located the mine in the first place gave it that name––the Cross of Gold!”

“Humph! It looks to me, from what I’ve heard of it,” growled the older prospector, “that 25 the Double Cross would have been a heap more fittin’ name for it. It’s busted everybody that ever had it.”

The younger man laughed softly and remonstrated: “Now, what’s the use in saying that? It wasn’t the Croix d’Or that broke my father–––”

“But his half in it was all he had left when he died!”

“That is true, and it is true that he sunk more than a hundred thousand in it; but it was the stock-market that got him. Besides, how about Sloan, my father’s old-time partner? He’s not broke, by a long shot!”

“No,” came the grumbling response, “he’s not busted, just because he had sense enough to lay his hand down when he’d gone the limit.”

“Lay his hand down? Say, Bill, you’re a little twisted, aren’t you? Better go back over the last month or two and think it over. We, being partners, are working up in the Cœur d’Alenes. Our prospect pinches out. We’ve got just seven hundred left between us on the day we bring the drills and hammers back, throw them in the corner of the cabin, and say ‘We’re on a dead one. What next?’ Then we get the letter saying that my father, whom I haven’t 26 seen in ten years, nor heard much of, owing to certain things, is dead, and that all he left was his half of the Croix d’Or. The letter comes from whom? Sloan! And it says that although he and my father, owing to father’s abominable temper, had not been intimate for a year or two, he still respected his memory, and wanted to befriend his son. Didn’t he? Then he said that he had enough belief left in the Croix d’Or to back it for a hundred thousand more, if I, being a practical miner, thought well of it. Do you call that laying down a hand? Humph!”

The elder man finished rolling a cigarette, and then looked at him with twinkling, whimsical eyes, as if continuing the argument merely for the sake of debate.

“Well, if he thinks it’s such a good thing, why didn’t he offer to buy you out? Why didn’t they work her sooner? She’s been idle, and water-soaked, for three years, ain’t she? As sure as your name’s Dick Townsend, and mine’s Bill Mathews, that old feller back East don’t think you’re goin’ to say it’s all right. He knows all about you! He knows you don’t stand for no lies or crooked work, and are a fool for principle, like a bee that goes and sticks his stinger 27 into somethin’ even though he knows he’s goin’ to kill himself by doin’ it.”

“Bosh!”

“And how do you know he ain’t figurin’ it this way: ‘Now I’ll send Dick Townsend down there to look at it. He’ll say it’s no good. Then I’ll buy him out and unload this Cross of Gold hole and plant it on some tenderfoot and get mine back!’ You cain’t make me believe in any of those Wall Street fellers! They all deal from the bottom of the deck and keep shoemaker’s wax on their cuff buttons to steal the lone ace!”

As if giving the lie to his growling complaints and pessimism, he laughed with a bellowing cachinnation that prompted the burros, now rested, to look at him with long gray ears thrust forward curiously, and wonder at his noise.

Townsend appeared to comprehend that his partner was but half in earnest, and smiled good-humoredly.

“Well, Bill,” he said, “if the mine’s not full of water or bad air, so that we can’t form any idea at all, we’ll not be long in saying what we think of it. We ought to be there in an hour from now. Let’s hike.”

They began the slow, plodding gait of the packer again, finding it easier now that they were 28 on the crest of a divide where the trail was less obstructed and firmer, and the yellow lines on the peak, their goal, came more plainly into view. The cross resolved itself into a peculiar slide of oxidized earth traversing two gullies, and the arm of the cross no longer appeared true to the perpendicular. The tall tamaracks began to segregate as the travelers dropped to a lower altitude; and pine and fir, fragrant with spring odor, seemed watching them. The trail at last took an abrupt turn away from the cross-marked mountain, and they came to another halt.

“This must be where they told us to turn off through the woods and down the slope, I think,” said Townsend. “Doesn’t it seem so to you, Bill?”

The old prospector frowned off toward the top of the peak now high above them, and then, with the peculiar farsightedness of an outdoor man of the West, looked around at the horizon as if calculating the position of the mine.

“Sure,” he agreed. “It can’t be any use to keep on the trail now. We’d better go to the right. They said we’d come to a little draw, then from the top of a low divide we’d see the mine buildings. Come on, Jack,” he ended, addressing the foremost burro, which patiently 29 turned after