With this vague but sole purpose he left the cabin, and almost mechanically turned his steps towards the creek he had crossed that morning.  He knew that by this route he would avoid meeting his companions; its difficulties and circuitousness would exercise his feverish limbs and give him time for reflection.  He had determined to leave the claim, but whence he had not yet considered.  He reached the bank of the creek where he had stood two hours before; it seemed to him two years.  He looked curiously at his reflection in one of the broad pools of overflow, and fancied he looked older.  He watched the rush and outset of the turbid current hurrying to meet the South Fork, and to eventually lose itself in the yellow Sacramento.  Even in his preoccupation he was impressed with a likeness to himself and his companions in this flood that had burst its peaceful boundaries.  In the drifting fragments of one of their forgotten flumes washed from the bank, he fancied he saw an omen of the disintegration and decay of the Lone Star claim.

The strange hush in the air that he had noticed before—­a calm so inconsistent with that hour and the season as to seem portentous—­became more marked in contrast to the feverish rush of the turbulent water-course.  A few clouds lazily huddled in the west apparently had gone to rest with the sun on beds of somnolent poppies.  There was a gleam as of golden water everywhere along the horizon, washing out the cold snowpeaks, and drowning even the rising moon.  The creek caught it here and there, until, in grim irony, it seemed to bear their broken sluice-boxes and useless engines on the very Pactolian stream they had been hopefully created to direct and carry.  But by some peculiar trick of the atmosphere, the perfect plenitude of that golden sunset glory was lavished on the rugged sides and tangled crest of the Lone Star mountain.  That isolated peak, the landmark of their claim, the gaunt monument of their folly, transfigured in the evening splendor, kept its radiance unquenched long after the glow had fallen from the encompassing skies, and when at last the rising moon, step by step, put out the fires along the winding valley and plains, and crept up the bosky sides of the canyon, the vanishing sunset was lost only to reappear as a golden crown.

The eyes of the young man were fixed upon it with more than a momentary picturesque interest.  It had been the favorite ground of his prospecting exploits, its lowest flank had been scarred in the old enthusiastic days with hydraulic engines, or pierced with shafts, but its central position in the claim and its superior height had always given it a commanding view of the extent of their valley and its approaches, and it was this practical pre-eminence that alone attracted him at that moment.  He knew that from its crest he would be able to distinguish the figures of his companions, as they crossed the valley near the cabin, in the growing moonlight.  Thus he could avoid encountering them on his way to the high road, and yet see them, perhaps, for the last time.  Even in his sense of injury there was a strange satisfaction in the thought.