“Wal, boss, what do you say to thet diggin’s?” demanded Jesse Smith.

Kells drew a deep breath.  “Old forty-niner, this beats all I ever saw!”

“Shore I’ve seen Sacramento look like thet!” added Bate Wood.

Pearce and Cleve gazed with fixed eyes, and, however different their emotions, they rivaled each other in attention.

“Jesse, what’s the word?” queried Kells, with a sharp return to the business of the matter.

“I’ve picked a site on the other side of camp.  Best fer us,” he replied.

“Shall we keep to the road?”

“Certain-lee,” he returned, with his grin.

Kells hesitated, and felt of his beard, probably conjecturing the possibilities of recognition.

“Whiskers make another man of you.  Reckon you needn’t expect to be known over here.”

That decided Kells.  He pulled his sombrero well down, shadowing his face.  Then he remembered Joan and made a slight significant gesture at her mask.

“Kells, the people in this here camp wouldn’t look at an army ridin’ through,” responded Smith.  “It’s every man fer hisself.  An’ wimmen, say! there’s all kinds.  I seen a dozen with veils, an’ them’s the same as masks.”  Nevertheless, Kells had Joan remove the mask and pull her sombrero down, and instructed her to ride in the midst of the group.  Then they trotted on, soon catching up with the jogging pack-train.

What a strange ride that was for Joan!  The slope resembled a magnified ant-hill with a horde of frantic ants in action.  As she drew closer she saw these ants were men, digging for gold.  Those near at hand could be plainly seen—­rough, ragged, bearded men and smooth-faced boys.  Farther on and up the slope, along the waterways and ravines, were miners so close they seemed almost to interfere with one another.  The creek bottom was alive with busy, silent, violent men, bending over the water, washing and shaking and paddling, all desperately intent upon something.  They had not time to look up.  They were ragged, unkempt, barearmed and bare-legged, every last one of them with back bent.  For a mile or more Kells’s party trotted through this part of the diggings, and everywhere, on rocky bench and gravel bar and gray slope, were holes with men picking and shoveling in them.  Some were deep and some were shallow; some long trenches and others mere pits.  If all of these prospectors were finding gold, then gold was everywhere.  And presently Joan did not need to have Kells tell her that all of these diggers were finding dust.  How silent they were—­how tense!  They were not mechanical.  It was a soul that drove them.  Joan had seen many men dig for gold, and find a little now and then, but she had never seen men dig when they knew they were going to strike gold.  That made the strange difference.

Joan calculated she must have seen a thousand miners in less than two miles of the gulch, and then she could not see up the draws and washes that intersected the slope, and she could not see beyond the camp.