And in all that mighty sweep of earth he saw no sign of man nor of the handiwork of man—­save only the torn bosom of the hillside at his feet.  The man looked long and carefully.  Once, far down his own canyon, he thought he saw in the air a faint hint of smoke.  He looked again and decided that it was the purple haze of the hills made dark by a convolution of the canyon wall at its back.

“Hey, you, Mr. Pocket!” he called down into the canyon.  “Stand out from under!  I’m a-comin’, Mr. Pocket!  I’m a-comin’!”

The heavy brogans on the man’s feet made him appear clumsy-footed, but he swung down from the giddy height as lightly and airily as a mountain goat.  A rock, turning under his foot on the edge of the precipice, did not disconcert him.  He seemed to know the precise time required for the turn to culminate in disaster, and in the meantime he utilized the false footing itself for the momentary earth-contact necessary to carry him on into safety.  Where the earth sloped so steeply that it was impossible to stand for a second upright, the man did not hesitate.  His foot pressed the impossible surface for but a fraction of the fatal second and gave him the bound that carried him onward.  Again, where even the fraction of a second’s footing was out of the question, he would swing his body past by a moment’s hand-grip on a jutting knob of rock, a crevice, or a precariously rooted shrub.  At last, with a wild leap and yell, he exchanged the face of the wall for an earth-slide and finished the descent in the midst of several tons of sliding earth and gravel.

His first pan of the morning washed out over two dollars in coarse gold.  It was from the centre of the “V.”  To either side the diminution in the values of the pans was swift.  His lines of crosscutting holes were growing very short.  The converging sides of the inverted “V” were only a few yards apart.  Their meeting-point was only a few yards above him.  But the pay-streak was dipping deeper and deeper into the earth.  By early afternoon he was sinking the test-holes five feet before the pans could show the gold-trace.

For that matter, the gold-trace had become something more than a trace; it was a placer mine in itself, and the man resolved to come back after he had found the pocket and work over the ground.  But the increasing richness of the pans began to worry him.  By late afternoon the worth of the pans had grown to three and four dollars.  The man scratched his head perplexedly and looked a few feet up the hill at the manzanita bush that marked approximately the apex of the “V.”  He nodded his head and said oracularly: 

“It’s one o’ two things, Bill; one o’ two things.  Either Mr. Pocket’s spilled himself all out an’ down the hill, or else Mr. Pocket’s that damned rich you maybe won’t be able to carry him all away with you.  And that’d be hell, wouldn’t it, now?” He chuckled at contemplation of so pleasant a dilemma.