Nightfall found him by the edge of the stream his eyes wrestling with the gathering darkness over the washing of a five-dollar pan.

“Wisht I had an electric light to go on working.” he said.

He found sleep difficult that night.  Many times he composed himself and closed his eyes for slumber to overtake him; but his blood pounded with too strong desire, and as many times his eyes opened and he murmured wearily, “Wisht it was sun-up.”

Sleep came to him in the end, but his eyes were open with the first paling of the stars, and the gray of dawn caught him with breakfast finished and climbing the hillside in the direction of the secret abiding-place of Mr. Pocket.

The first cross-cut the man made, there was space for only three holes, so narrow had become the pay-streak and so close was he to the fountainhead of the golden stream he had been following for four days.

“Be ca’m, Bill; be ca’m,” he admonished himself, as he broke ground for the final hole where the sides of the “V” had at last come together in a point.

“I’ve got the almighty cinch on you, Mr. Pocket, an’ you can’t lose me,” he said many times as he sank the hole deeper and deeper.

Four feet, five feet, six feet, he dug his way down into the earth.  The digging grew harder.  His pick grated on broken rock.  He examined the rock.  “Rotten quartz,” was his conclusion as, with the shovel, he cleared the bottom of the hole of loose dirt.  He attacked the crumbling quartz with the pick, bursting the disintegrating rock asunder with every stroke.

He thrust his shovel into the loose mass.  His eye caught a gleam of yellow.  He dropped the shovel and squatted suddenly on his heels.  As a farmer rubs the clinging earth from fresh-dug potatoes, so the man, a piece of rotten quartz held in both hands, rubbed the dirt away.

“Sufferin’ Sardanopolis!” he cried.  “Lumps an’ chunks of it!  Lumps an’ chunks of it!”

It was only half rock he held in his hand.  The other half was virgin gold.  He dropped it into his pan and examined another piece.  Little yellow was to be seen, but with his strong fingers he crumbled the rotten quartz away till both hands were filled with glowing yellow.  He rubbed the dirt away from fragment after fragment, tossing them into the gold-pan.  It was a treasure-hole.  So much had the quartz rotted away that there was less of it than there was of gold.  Now and again he found a piece to which no rock clung—­a piece that was all gold.  A chunk, where the pick had laid open the heart of the gold, glittered like a handful of yellow jewels, and he cocked his head at it and slowly turned it around and over to observe the rich play of the light upon it.

“Talk about yer Too Much Gold diggin’s!” the man snorted contemptuously.  “Why, this diggin’ ’d make it look like thirty cents.  This diggin’ is All Gold.  An’ right here an’ now I name this yere canyon ‘All Gold Canyon,’ b’ gosh!”