“I call it a very pleasant cabin,” the Colonel would say as he lit up and looked about.  Anything dismaller it would be hard to find.  Not clean and shipshape as the Boy kept the tent.  But with double army blankets nailed over the single window it was blessedly dark, if stuffy, and in crying need of cleaning.  Still, they were mighty good fellows, and they had a right to be cheerful.  Up there, on the rude shelf above the stove, was a row of old tomato-cans brimful of Bonanza gold.  There they stood, not even covered.  Dim as the light was, you could see the little top nuggets peering out at you over the ragged tin-rims, in a never locked shanty, never molested, never bothered about.  Nearly every cabin on the creek had similar chimney ornaments, but not everyone boasted an old coat, kept under the bunk, full of the bigger sort of nuggets.

The Colonel was always ready with pretended admiration of such bric-a-brac, but the truth was he cared very little about this gold he had come so far to find.  His own wages, paid in dust, were kept in a jam-pot the Boy had found “lyin’ round.”

The growing store shone cheerfully through the glass, but its value in the Colonel’s eyes seemed to be simply as an argument to prove that they had enough, and “needn’t worry.”  When the Boy said there was no doubt this was the district in all the world the most overdone, the Colonel looked at him with sun-tired, reproachful eyes.

“You want to dissolve the pardnership—­I see.”

“I don’t.”

But the Colonel, after any such interchange, would go off and smoke by himself, not even caring for Buckeyes’.  The work was plainly overtaxing him.  He slept badly, was growing moody and quick to take offence.  One day when he had been distinctly uncivil he apologized for himself by saying that, standing with feet always in the wet, head always in the scorching sun, he had taken a hell of a cold.  Certain it was that, without sullenness, he would give in to long fits of silence; and his wide, honest eyes were heavy again, as if the snow-blindness of the winter had its analogue in a summer torment from the sun.  And his sometimes unusual gentleness to his companion was sharply alternated with unusual choler, excited by a mere nothing.  Enough if the Boy were not in the tent when the Colonel came and went.  Of course, the Boy did the cooking.  The Colonel ate almost nothing, but he made a great point of his pardner’s service in doing the cooking.  He would starve, he said, if he had to cook for himself as well as swing a shovel; and the Boy, acting on pure instinct, pretended that he believed this was so.

Then came the evening when the Boy was so late the Colonel got his own breakfast; and when the recreant did get home, it was to announce that a man over at the Buckeyes’ had just offered him a job out on Indian River.  The Colonel set down his tea-cup and stared.  His face took on an odd, rigid look.  But almost indifferently he said: