When old Rawson saw him he, too, remarked on his thinness; but more encouragingly.

“Well, ‘a lean dog for a long chase,’” he said.

“How are cattle?” inquired Keith.

The old fellow turned his eyes on him with a keen look.

“Cattle’s tolerable.  I been buyin’ a considerable number up toward Gumbolt, where you’re goin’.  I may get you to look after ’em some day,” he chuckled.

Gordon wrote to Dave Dennison that he was going to Gumbolt and would look out for him.  A little later he learned that the boy had already gone there.

The means of reaching Gumbolt from Eden, the terminus of the railroad which Wickersham & Company were building, was still the stage, a survivor of the old-time mountain coach, which had outlasted all the manifold chances and changes of fortune.

Happily for Keith, he had been obliged, though it was raining, to take the outside seat by the driver, old Tim Gilsey, to whom he recalled himself, and by his coolness at “Hellstreak Hill,” where the road climbed over the shoulder of the mountain along a sheer cliff, and suddenly dropped to the river below, a point where old Gilsey was wont to display his skill as a driver and try the nerves of passengers, he made the old man his friend for life.

When the stage began to ascend the next hill, the old driver actually unbent so far as to give an account of a “hold-up” that had occurred at that point not long before, “all along of the durned railroad them Yankees was bringin’ into the country,” to which he laid most of the evils of the time.  “For when you run a stage you know who you got with you,” declared Mr. Gilsey; “but when you run a railroad you dunno who you got.”

“Well, tell me about the time you were held up.”

“Didn’t nobody hold me up,” sniffed Mr. Gilsey.  “If I had been goin’ to stop I wouldn’t ‘a’ started.  It was a dom fool they put up here when I was down with rheumatiz.  Since then they let me pick my substitute.

“Well,” he said, as a few lights twinkled below them, “there she is.  Some pretty tough characters there, too.  But you ain’t goin’ to have no trouble with ’em.  All you got to do is to put the curb on ’em onct.”

As Keith looked about him in Gumbolt, the morning after his arrival, he found that his new home was only a rude mining-camp, raw and rugged; a few rows of frame houses, beginning to be supplanted by hasty brick structures, stretched up the hills on the sides of unpaved roads, dusty in dry weather and bottomless in wet.  Yet it was, for its size, already one of the most cosmopolitan places in the country.  Of course, the population was mainly American, and they were beginning to pour in—­sharp-eyed men from the towns in black coats, and long-legged, quiet-looking and quiet-voiced mountaineers in rusty clothes, who hulked along in single file, silent and almost fugitive in the glare of daylight.  Quiet they were and well-nigh stealthy, with something of the movement of other denizens of the forest, unless they were crossed and aroused, and then, like those other denizens, they were fierce almost beyond belief.  A small cavil might make a great quarrel, and pistols would flash as quick as light.