doctor."

"Well, no, I don't think it is."

"I suppose it comes to the same thing in the end. I don't want to lay by money. What should I do with it if I had it?"

"You don't want to lay by money because you are strong, and can go on earning it for years yet; and you both know very well that if you had a hundred thousand dollars you would chuck it all away in six months."

Sim Howlett laughed aloud.

"Perhaps you are right, doctor," English Bill said. "But if your argument means anything, it means that we are fools for working as hard as we do."

"Not at all," the doctor said gently. "You don't earn more than you want, as is shown by the fact that you lay by so little, and that we haven't more than enough dust in our sack to keep us for a month or two if we don't happen to strike it in the next claim we take up. No; I think we earn just enough. If you earned three times as much you would go three times as often to that cursed gambling-table, and it would be bad for your temper. If Sim earned three times as much he would go on the spree three times as often, and it would be bad for his health. If I were to earn three times as much, I should have three times as many patients to attend to, and I couldn't stand such a strain; so you see we are just right as we are," and he nodded pleasantly to his two comrades.

"You are the most perplexing beggar I ever came across, doctor," the Englishman said, "and I have seen some rum specimens during the twenty years I have been knocking about in the States."

The little man nodded as if it had been a compliment.

"I know, Bill. That is what I think myself sometimes; there is a tile just a little loose somewhere."

"Not at all, not at all," Bill said hotly; while Sim Howlett growled that he would like to hear any one else say so.

"Not off, you know," Frank said, "but just a little loose. I know, dear boys. You see my machine gets muddled up. It may work right enough sometimes, but the chances are that a cog has got bent, or that there is a little twist in a crank, and the thing never works quite even. It just catches, you know—rattles now and then. You may look it all over as much as you like, but you cannot spot where it is. You say it wants grease, but you may pour bucketfuls over it and it makes no difference. There"—and he broke off—"they are at it again up in that saloon."

Two or three pistol-shots rang out in the evening air.

"Things are not going on as they ought to," he went on quietly. "That is another machine that wants regulating. There are more bad men in this camp than there ought to be."

"Don't you worry yourself," Bill said hastily. "You cannot expect a mining camp to be a sort of paradise, doctor, and all the bad men kept outside. Things have been going on pretty smooth of late. It has been quite a peaceful camp."

"I don't like the ways of that man Symonds the gambler," the doctor said meditatively, with his head a little on one side.

"He is a bad lot," Sim Howlett agreed; "but he is going. I heard tell yesterday that he said he was going down to Frisco at the end of the week; and if he doesn't go, Bill and I will get a dozen other fellows to go with us and tell him that he had better git, or the air of this camp is likely to be unhealthy for him."

"Well, if that is so we need not think any more about it," the doctor said. "I dreamt last night I saw him with a bullet mark in the centre of his forehead; but perhaps that was a mistake, or the mark will not come at present. It will come sooner or later," he added musingly, "but perhaps not for a good time yet."

"Well, well," Sim Howlett broke in, "we are wandering about like green hands lost in a sage-bush. We started by talking about whether, when we have worked up our claim, we shall stop here or foot it."

"If we foot it, where do you propose to go, Sim?"

"I heard this morning that they are doing well in that new place they call Gold Run. Then, again, you know we have always had a fancy for a month's prospecting up at the head of the Yuba. The gold must come from somewhere, though nobody has ever hit the spot yet."

"I am ready to go where you like, Sim," the doctor said; "but as I have often told you before, you miners are altogether wrong in your notions, as any one can see with half an eye by the fact, that whether you are down here in the bottom of a gulch, or whether you are up on those flats, 2000 feet above us, you always find gravel. Now those flats were once the bed of a great river, that was when the mountains round were tens of thousands of feet higher than they are now; they must have been all that or there would never be water enough for such a river as that must have been. That river must have rolled on for thousands of years, for the gravel, which you can see in some places is 500 feet thick, is all water-worn; whether it is big boulders or little stones, it has all been rolled about.

"Well, in time these mountains were all worn away. There wasn't water then for the big river, and the water from the hills, as you see them now, began to cut fresh channels, and this Yuba, which is one of them, lies a thousand feet below the old gravel bed. In some places it has crossed the old bed, and the gold that came down from the former mountains into the gravel has been washed down into these valleys. You will never find, as you all dream of doing, a quartz vein stuck full of gold. There may have been veins like that in the old mountains, but the quartz veins that you find now, and lots of them have been assayed, are all very poor; they have got gold in them, but scarce enough to pay for working even when they get the best machinery. I fancy gold goes off with depth, though why it should I cannot say, and that these quartz veins which near the surface had big nuggets, and were choke-full of small stuff, just pettered away to nothing as they went deeper. That is why I think, Sim, that you will find no quartz reefs worth working anywhere now, and why you are less likely to find much pay dirt in the upper gorges, because the water there has not gone through the old gravel fields as it has in its windings lower down."

"But according to that, doctor, we should find it richest of all if we were to sink in the bed of the river down by the plains."

"Not at all, not at all, Bill. From the point where the Yuba's course leaves the old gravel bed of the big river and makes its own way through hills down to the plains it has picked up no more gold. As you know the big nuggets are generally found pretty high up, as was natural they should be, for as soon as the new river washed them out of the old bed they would sink down in some convenient hole; and as in the course of ages the Yuba cut down deeper and deeper, they would go down too. Their weight would prevent their rolling far; the light stuff would wash down, moving onwards with the sands and gravel. And so, as you search lower down, you get better surface washings, but find less coarse gold."

"I dare say you are right, doctor," Sim Howlett said yawning, "so we won't go prospecting up in the hills, though some nice little finds have been made up there in spite of what you say. I vote we leave it open until we have cleared up, and then look round. A new rush may be started before a week is over, and if we are ready to move at once we may manage to take up claims in the thick of it; if one isn't pretty early at a new place, one may just as well stay away altogether. There is the horn. The mail is late to-night. I will go out and see if I can get hold of a Sacramento paper—one sees all about the new places there. Not that one need swallow all they say, for the lies about what is being got are tremendous. One fellow strikes it rich, and then they put it in that every fellow in the camp is making from