He turned and flung a measuring glance at the sun poised above him in the azure of the cloudless sky.  Then he went down the canyon, following the line of shovel-holes he had made in filling the pans.  He crossed the stream below the pool and disappeared through the green screen.  There was little opportunity for the spirit of the place to return with its quietude and repose, for the man’s voice, raised in ragtime song, still dominated the canyon with possession.

After a time, with a greater clashing of steel-shod feet on rock, he returned.  The green screen was tremendously agitated.  It surged back and forth in the throes of a struggle.  There was a loud grating and clanging of metal.  The man’s voice leaped to a higher pitch and was sharp with imperativeness.  A large body plunged and panted.  There was a snapping and ripping and rending, and amid a shower of falling leaves a horse burst through the screen.  On its back was a pack, and from this trailed broken vines and torn creepers.  The animal gazed with astonished eyes at the scene into which it had been precipitated, then dropped its head to the grass and began contentedly to graze.  A second horse scrambled into view, slipping once on the mossy rocks and regaining equilibrium when its hoofs sank into the yielding surface of the meadow.  It was riderless, though on its back was a high-horned Mexican saddle, scarred and discolored by long usage.

The man brought up the rear.  He threw off pack and saddle, with an eye to camp location, and gave the animals their freedom to graze.  He unpacked his food and got out frying-pan and coffee-pot.  He gathered an armful of dry wood, and with a few stones made a place for his fire.

“My!” he said, “but I’ve got an appetite.  I could scoff iron-filings an’ horseshoe nails an’ thank you kindly, ma’am, for a second helpin’.”

He straightened up, and, while he reached for matches in the pocket of his overalls, his eyes travelled across the pool to the side-hill.  His fingers had clutched the match-box, but they relaxed their hold and the hand came out empty.  The man wavered perceptibly.  He looked at his preparations for cooking and he looked at the hill.

“Guess I’ll take another whack at her,” he concluded, starting to cross the stream.

“They ain’t no sense in it, I know,” he mumbled apologetically.  “But keepin’ grub back an hour ain’t goin’ to hurt none, I reckon.”

A few feet back from his first line of test-pans he started a second line.  The sun dropped down the western sky, the shadows lengthened, but the man worked on.  He began a third line of test-pans.  He was cross-cutting the hillside, line by line, as he ascended.  The centre of each line produced the richest pans, while the ends came where no colors showed in the pan.  And as he ascended the hillside the lines grew perceptibly shorter.  The regularity with which their length diminished served to indicate that somewhere up the slope the last line would be so short as to have scarcely length at all, and that beyond could come only a point.  The design was growing into an inverted “V.”  The converging sides of this “V” marked the boundaries of the gold-bearing dirt.