At this moment she heard voices, and the figures of two men appeared on the trail.

They were talking earnestly, and walking as if familiar with the spot, yet gazing around them as if at some novelty of the aspect.

“And look there,” said one; “there has been some serious disturbance of that outcrop,” pointing in the direction of the spring; “the lower part has distinctly subsided.”  He spoke with a certain authority, and dominance of position, and was evidently the superior, as he was the elder of the two, although both were roughly dressed.

“Yes, it does kinder look as if it had lost its holt, like the ledge yonder.”

“And you see I am right; the movement was from east to west,” continued the elder man.

The girl could not comprehend what they said, and even thought them a little silly.  But she advanced towards them; at which they stopped short, staring at her.  With feminine instinct she addressed the more important one:—­

“Ye ain’t passed no wagon nor team goin’ on, hev ye?”

“What sort of wagon?” said the man.

“Em’grant wagon, two yaller hosses.  Old man—­my dad—­drivin’.”  She added the latter kinship as a protecting influence against strangers, in spite of her previous independence.

The men glanced at each other.

“How long ago?”

The girl suddenly remembered that she had slept two hours.

“Sens noon,” she said hesitatingly.

“Since the earthquake?”

“Wot’s that?”

The man came impatiently towards her.  “How did you come here?”

“Got outer the wagon to walk.  I reckon dad missed the trail, and hez got off somewhere where I can’t find him.”

“What trail was he on,—­where was he going?”

“Sank Hozay,* I reckon.  He was goin’ up the grade—­side o’ the hill; he must hev turned off where there’s a big rock hangin’ over.”

     * San Jose.

“Did you see him turn off?”

“No.”

The second man, who was in hearing distance, had turned away, and was ostentatiously examining the sky and the treetops; the man who had spoken to her joined him, and they said something in a low voice.  They turned again and came slowly towards her.  She, from some obscure sense of imitation, stared at the treetops and the sky as the second man had done.  But the first man now laid his hand kindly on her shoulder and said, “Sit down.”

Then they told her there had been an earthquake so strong that it had thrown down a part of the hillside, including the wagon trail.  That a wagon team and driver, such as she had described, had been carried down with it, crushed to fragments, and buried under a hundred feet of rock in the gulch below.  A party had gone down to examine, but it would be weeks perhaps before they found it, and she must be prepared for the worst.  She looked at them vaguely and with tearless eyes.