Clarence’s brain reeled in utter confusion and hopeless terror.

Was he going crazy, or had these cruel men learned his story from his faithless friends, and this was a part of the plot?  He staggered forward, but the men had risen and quickly encircled him, as if to prevent his escape.  In vague and helpless desperation he gasped—­

“What place is this?”

“Folks call it Deadman’s Gulch.”

Deadman’s Gulch!  A flash of intelligence lit up the boy’s blind confusion.  Deadman’s Gulch!  Could it have been Jim Hooker who had really run away, and had taken his name?  He turned half-imploringly to the first speaker.

“Wasn’t he older than me, and bigger?  Didn’t he have a smooth, round face and little eyes?  Didn’t he talk hoarse?  Didn’t he—­” He stopped hopelessly.

“Yes; oh, he wasn’t a bit like you,” said the man musingly.  “Ye see, that’s the h-ll of it!  You’re altogether too many and too various fur this camp.”

“I don’t know who’s been here before, or what they have said,” said Clarence desperately, yet even in that desperation retaining the dogged loyalty to his old playmate, which was part of his nature.  “I don’t know, and I don’t care—­there!  I’m Clarence Brant of Kentucky; I started in Silsbee’s train from St. Jo, and I’m going to the mines, and you can’t stop me!”

The man who had first spoken started, looked keenly at Clarence, and then turned to the others.  The gentleman known as the living skeleton had obtruded his huge bulk in front of the boy, and, gazing at him, said reflectively, “Darned if it don’t look like one of Brant’s pups—­sure!”

“Air ye any relation to Kernel Hamilton Brant of Looeyville?” asked the first speaker.

Again that old question!  Poor Clarence hesitated, despairingly.  Was he to go through the same cross-examination he had undergone with the Peytons?  “Yes,” he said doggedly, “I am—­but he’s dead, and you know it.”

“Dead—­of course.”  “Sartin.”  “He’s dead.”  “The Kernel’s planted,” said the men in chorus.

“Well, yes,” reflected the Living Skeleton ostentatiously, as one who spoke from experience.  “Ham Brant’s about as bony now as they make ’em.”

“You bet!  About the dustiest, deadest corpse you kin turn out,” corroborated Slumgullion Dick, nodding his head gloomily to the others; “in point o’ fack, es a corpse, about the last one I should keer to go huntin’ fur.”

“The Kernel’s tech ’ud be cold and clammy,” concluded the Duke of Chatham Street, who had not yet spoken, “sure.  But what did yer mammy say about it?  Is she gettin’ married agin?  Did she send ye here?”

It seemed to Clarence that the Duke of Chatham Street here received a kick from his companions; but the boy repeated doggedly—­

“I came to Sacramento to find my cousin, Jackson Brant; but he wasn’t there.”

“Jackson Brant!” echoed the first speaker, glancing at the others.  “Did your mother say he was your cousin?”