He saddled the buckskin mule next morning and after breakfast the three set out, with a lunch and two canteens of water.  The Little Woman was in a very good humor and kept Casey “jumpin’ sideways,” as he afterwards confessed to me, wondering just what she meant or whether she meant nothing at all by her remarks concerning his future wealth and dignity and how he would forget old friends.

She even pretended she had forgotten the place, and was not at all sure that this was the right canyon, when they came to it.  She studied landmarks and then said they were all wrong and that the place was marked in her mind by something entirely different and not what she first named.  She deviled Casey all she could, and led him straight to the spot and suggested that they eat their lunch there, within twenty feet of the bushes from which she had seen the Indian creep with the sack on his back.

She underrated Casey’s knowledge of minerals; or perhaps she wanted to test it,—­you never can tell what a woman really has in the back of her mind.  Casey sat there eating a sour-dough biscuit of his own making, and staring at the steep wall of the canyon because he was afraid to stare at the Little Woman, and so his uncannily keen eye saw a bit of rock no larger than Babe’s fist.  It lay just under that particular clump of bushes, in the shade.  And in the shade he saw a yellow gleam on the rock.

He looked at the Little Woman then and grinned, but he didn’t say anything until he had taken the coffeepot off the fire, and had filled her cup.

“This ain’t a bad canyon to prospect in.  You can brush up your memory whilst I take a look around.  Mebby I can find Jim’s mine myself,” he said impudently.  Then he got up and went poking here and there with his prospector’s pick, and finally worked up to the brush and disappeared behind it.  In five minutes or less he came back to her with a little nugget the size of Babe’s thumb.

“If yuh want to see something pretty, come on up where I got this here,” he told her.  “I’ll show yuh what drives prospectors crazy.  This ain’t no free gold country, but there’s a pile uh gold in a dirt bank I can show yuh.  Mebby you forgot the place, and mebby yuh didn’t.  I’ve quit guessin’ at what yuh really do mean an’ what yuh don’t mean.  Anyway, this is where we headed for.”

“Well, you really are a prospector, after all.  I just wondered.”  The Little Woman did not seem in the least embarrassed.  She just laughed and took Babe by the hand, and they went up beyond the clump of bushes to what lay hidden so cunningly behind it.

Cunning—­that was the mood Nature must have been in when she planted free gold in that little wrinkle on the side of Two Peak, and set the bushes in the mouth of the draw, and piled an iron ledge across the top and spread barren mountainside all around it.  In the hiding Injun Jim had done his share, too.  He had pulled rubble down over the face of the bank of richness, and eyes less keen than Casey’s would have passed it by without a second glance.