Taking his rope with him King made what haste he could going down the cliffs.  The sides of the ravine were littered with dead wood, drift and limbs that had broken off the few battered trees above.  He gathered as heavy a load of dry branches as he could handle, bound them about with his rope, and, fighting his way all the way up, clambered again to the upper cave.  Gloria had not stirred.  He moved about her, went a dozen paces deeper into the great cavern, and threw down his wood.  Breaking branches into short lengths he quickly got a fire going.  The flames spurted up eagerly, bright and cheery, and threw dancing light among the wavering shadows.  He brought the bedding-roll closer and opened it into a rough-and-ready bed.  Then he called to Gloria.

“You’d better lie here by the fire,” he told her.  “You’re apt to catch cold there.”

She was sitting up, watching him.  Now she rose listlessly and came forward, dropping down into a sitting position upon the blankets, her chilled hands out toward the blaze.

“I don’t like the look of this storm,” he told her.  “It is up to us to hurry.  I am going to look around now.  I think you had better rest all you can so as to be ready to make a start back as soon as I find out whether we are on a wild-goose chase or not.”

“You mean—­we may start back to-day?”

“I don’t know what I am going to find, of course; whether I am going to find anything.  But if we can get only a couple of hours on our way to-day, it’s just that much gained.”

“You are going to leave me here?”

“I won’t be far.”  With that he set fire to a dry pine faggot, the best torch available, and left her, going deeper into the cave.  She watched him, marvelling at the size of the cavern.  He went on a score of paces; he seemed to be ascending a steepening slant floor and then to have gone over a sort of ridge and to be descending again.  But still going further from her.  Presently she knew that the tunnel had turned sharply to the right; she could hear the thud of his boots and for a little while could see the flare of his torch against a wall of rock; he himself had passed out of her sight.

But she knew that he had not gone a great deal further.  For he was not so far away that she could not hear him; he was going back and forth; at irregular intervals she saw a dim, ghostly light playing upon the dark cavern walls.  And, despite the weary ache of a hardship-tortured body, she began to be interested in his search.  If there were, in truth, such gold here somewhere as he and her father with him had dreamed of—­gold for which seven men had died sixty years ago, for which old Loony Honeycutt had hungered all these years, for which Brodie and his following and even a city man like Gratton were like so many ravening wolves on the trail—­gold in quantity to make even toughened old gold-seekers delirious with the dreams of it—­why, then, that gold was half Mark King’s and half Ben Gaynor’s!  And it might be that now, at this very instant, Mark King was finding it; was standing over it, staring down at it by the ghostly flare of a smoking torch.  She sat, tense and still, listening, trying to probe with tired but suddenly bright eyes through the dark.