But it was not a camp which she was entering; it was a tent-walled town, a city of squat log cabins, a long, motley, checkered jumble of structures thrown up and together in mad haste.  The wide road split it in the middle and seemed a stream of color and life.  Joan rode between two lines of horses, burros, oxen, mules, packs and loads and canvas-domed wagons and gaudy vehicles resembling gipsy caravans.  The street was as busy as a beehive and as noisy as a bedlam.  The sidewalks were rough-hewn planks and they rattled under the tread of booted men.  There were tents on the ground and tents on floors and tents on log walls.  And farther on began the lines of cabins-stores and shops and saloons—­and then a great, square, flat structure with a flaring sign in crude gold letters, “Last Nugget,” from which came the creak of iddles and scrape of boots, and hoarse mirth.  Joan saw strange, wild-looking creatures—­women that made her shrink; and several others of her sex, hurrying along, carrying sacks or buckets, worn and bewildered-looking women, the sight of whom gave her a pang.  She saw lounging Indians and groups of lazy, bearded men, just like Kells’s band, and gamblers in long, black coats, and frontiersmen in fringed buckskin, and Mexicans with swarthy faces under wide, peaked sombreros; and then in great majority, dominating that stream of life, the lean and stalwart miners, of all ages, in their check shirts and high boots, all packing guns, jostling along, dark-browed, somber, and intent.  These last were the workers of this vast beehive; the others were the drones, the parasites.

Kell’s party rode on through the town, and Smith halted them beyond the outskirts, near a grove of spruce-trees, where camp was to be made.

Joan pondered over her impression of Alder Creek.  It was confused; she had seen too much.  But out of what she had seen and heard loomed two contrasting features:  a throng of toiling miners, slaves to their lust for gold and actuated by ambitions, hopes, and aims, honest, rugged, tireless workers, but frenzied in that strange pursuit; and a lesser crowd, like leeches, living for and off the gold they did not dig with blood of hand and sweat of brow.

Manifestly Jesse Smith had selected the spot for Kells’s permanent location at Alder Creek with an eye for the bandit’s peculiar needs.  It was out of sight of town, yet within a hundred rods of the nearest huts, and closer than that to a sawmill.  It could be approached by a shallow ravine that wound away toward the creek.  It was backed up against a rugged bluff in which there was a narrow gorge, choked with pieces of weathered cliff; and no doubt the bandits could go and come in that direction.  There was a spring near at hand and a grove of spruce-trees.  The ground was rocky, and apparently unfit for the digging of gold.

While Bate Wood began preparations for supper, and Cleve built the fire, and Smith looked after the horses, Kells and Pearce stepped off the ground where the cabin was to be erected.  They selected a level bench down upon which a huge cracked rock, as large as a house, had rolled.  The cabin was to be backed up against this stone, and in the rear, under cover of it, a secret exit could be made and hidden.  The bandit wanted two holes to his burrow.