themselves with the sureness of a cat, brushing off nothing of their loads. As for the two horses, they were more familiar with the strange path, and threaded its sinuosities like dogs tunnelling under the walls of a meat smokehouse. It is probable they scented their stable, and knew rest and food would shortly reward them for terrible toil and tribulation. Having pierced the tunnel of vegetation, there was one of stone, still more curious.

It was an almost regular tube, in black lava stone, four feet wide, seven or eight in height, smooth as glass mostly. Invisible fissures, however, must have supplied sweet air, for it was not hard breathing in all the extent, nearer three quarters of a mile than a half on the straight. No human hand had fashioned it; one must presume that, in the days when Vulcan swayed over Neptune on the earth, a torrent of lava was rushing down the steeps, when, suddenly, an immense snowfall smothered the fiery river and chilled it into a casing of stone around a still molten interior. That inner flow had continued, and left the tubular crust intact.

The ground was a fine sand, heavy with iron, so that it did not rise far. At the end of this channel a star suddenly gleamed, welcome in the complete darkness, into which, assuredly, the bravest of men would have hesitated to follow a foe. It was the outer air again, filling a basin, rock-engirt to a great height. In this lonely spot there was not a scrap of moss, not one blade of grass, and no shrub, however hardy. The calcined "blossom rock" wore a yellow hue, streaked with red and black; but here and there rose separate boulders of quartz, disintegrated by time and rain and whirling winds, which danced these Titanic blocks like thistles, and squeezed out those dull misshapen lumps. Those lumps were gold, however; this was a "mother-source"—one of those nests of Fortune for which the confirmed gold seeker quits home, family, wealth itself in other mines that content the less ravenous. Ridge traversed this placer—no pleasure to him, lonely Man of the Mountain—with a foot as reckless as those of the string of animals. The night was coming. He hurried them on into a second but short subterranean passage, with a couple of turnings, which finally opened into a cavern. At its far end a natural doorway afforded a view of the deep blue sky, where the brilliant stars seemed all of a sudden to be strewn. In those few moments the sun had gone down, and darkness come.

Ridge laid aside his gun, and started a fire, already laid, in a cavity of the grotto. The walls gleamed back the rising firelight; here amber studs in coal, there patches of mica-schist, varied gold and silver in hue.

After unpacking the animals, whose stores he carefully placed in caves, he sent them after the bell mare and the hunting horses, in through a channel to a sort of enclosed pasturage. Returning, he put some jerked meat down to broil, some roots to roast like so many potatoes, and added to the setting-out of a rude but hearty meal several of the delicacies brought in the train from Oregon. He was calmly smoking, reclining at great ease, with the air of one who felt he had earned the repose, lulled by the sweet murmur of underground streams, pouring out of ancient glaciers. The approach of footsteps made him glance round. The steps he knew to be Cherokee Bill's; so it was their being heavier than usual that alone roused him.

The half-breed was carrying a man over his shoulder with no more delicacy than if it had been a deer's carcase.

"Got him, Bill!" remarked Ridge.

"I should smile not to capture such a tenderfoot," was the rejoinder, as he flung his human prize upon the cavern floor.

CHAPTER IV.

THE MAN WHO RAN RIGHT INTO TROUBLE.

The prisoner of the Cherokee half-breed was in a forlorn state, more particularly as regarded apparel. Hardly suited for mountaineering at their best, his clothes were sorry rags, which an attempt at mending with bark fibre and rawhide had even rendered more lamentable. A horsehair lasso, of remarkable fineness and strength, was wound round and round him with a care which a Chinese would have envied. A handful of moss was the gag which nearly choked him, but his eyes were more full of rage than supplication, and they seemed to burn with enhanced indignation when he found the Indian was in concert with a white hunter.

Young Bill Williams flung his captive down on some dry rushes, and, laying aside his gun and the stranger's, which was broken, he sat down at the fire.

"It was a coyote," he remarked, scornfully. "But the Cherokee did not give him even time to yelp."

"Ah!" said Ridge, "I wonder you did not shoot him thar. Thar will always be plenty of that game on the prairie for the greenhorn hunter, I opine. It is all very well our discovering this country, but we don't want any raw Eastern fellows, with Boston dressing, discovering us!" Bill made no comment. He had pulled the soused bears' paws over to him, poured out some coffee—from which the full aroma was extracted by a sudden chill at the height of its boiling with cold water—and was thus beginning his meal.

The silence that fell was broken only by the champing of the two men as they repaid themselves for the travail since Monday. Each had a brandy flask, and their supplies included spirits, but neither drank anything but the sweet, pure water of the snow torrent. Ridge was naturally abstemious, the half-Cherokee sober from having seen the mischief wrought his mother's race by the firewater.

After the meal, the two smoked, and the white man faintly whistled a lively tune. Neither gave heed to the prisoner, who had ample leisure to gaze on the strange resort into which he had been unceremoniously conveyed.

The firelight illuminated the grotto; several gaps were outlets or storehouses; bales of furs, bundles of army and trade guns, kegs of powder, pigs of lead, packages of fancy goods used in Indian trading, harness, simple cooking utensils, these encumbered the place; but one could guess that they would form a barricade at emergency in case the enemy penetrated to this inmost hold. At first glance, and even at the leisure gaze of the prisoner, it seemed the den of a bandit.

"What did you bring him into the ranche for, chief?" inquired Ridge, in that pigeon-English of the Northwest, called the "Chinnook" dialect, though composed of Chinnook, Scotch, English, and Canadian-French, as well as hunters' English, to which confusing medley these two friends imparted still another zest by an infusion of Cherokee, Creole, French, and Spanish-American, for which good reason we forbear the sentences verbatim.

"Because," replied the other, "it was too dark to see the trail, and he must tell whether he is alone or the spy of a band. At all events, it doesn't look as if he had been in to the fort for his pay lately," added Bill, with a quiet fleeting smile, "and bought any clothes!"

"You are right. Loose him, and we'll try him. By the way, that's a beauty lariat, I can tell you."

Indeed, as before hinted, the lasso confining the captive was composed of selected horsehair, and toilsomely and deftly plaited.

"I was still on the scout," said Bill, whilst engaged undoing the bonds, rolling the man to and fro as suited his desires, "when suddenly a movement of a scrub pine half a pistol shot off made me bring my rifle to bear on it. I was just about to pull, when up pops my man, crying: 'Hold hard, or you're a dead Injun!' Me? It looked as if we were going to make our bullets kiss in midair, but I reckon I was a leetle the quicker, and while his ball whistled upon the top storeys of the sierra, mine cut his barrel in half, right there at the stock, which remained in his hand. So, as he staggered in surprise, I sprang on him, took off from his belt the lasso—a real article, and no mistake! Worth a war pony!—and girdled him like a papoose. Moreover, I wrapped my robe