“Two of them gone now,” he said.  “I wonder if that is what the other fellow wanted.”

CHAPTER XVIII

IN THE WILDERNESS

Dusk was closing down on the valley, and the rain had ceased, when Alton unstrapped his load, and stood with aching shoulders amidst the dripping pines.  He could hear the rattle of the twigs that met and brushed through the shrill wailing of the wind about the sombre spires that pierced the growing darkness far above him, and the harmonic murmuring that rose and fell in cadence along the dim, vaulted roof.  There was, however, nothing else beyond the growl of a rapid somewhere up the valley, and stretching out his arms wearily, he stooped with a little smile that was grim rather than mirthful and caught up the axe.

Now one can usually hear the thudding of the axe a mile or more in the stillness of the woods that is not silence to the bushman’s ear.  Their voice is always musical, and the sounds that man makes jar through its harmonies, but only a forest rancher or free prospector would have caught the muffled sound, that was lost in the song of the pines a few score yards from Alton’s camp.  He knew where to find the resinous knots with their sticky exudations, and was a master of the axe, while it was noticeable that when the fire commenced to crackle he stood still and listened again before he went down to the river with the kettle.  Nor did he at once return into the light, but slipped for a moment behind a wide-girthed trunk.  It was only a deer he heard moving along the hillside above him, and there was nothing visible but the row of stupendous columns that appeared and vanished as the red light rose and sank.  Alton set the kettle down amidst the flame, and unrolling one of the packages laid out his supper.

It was prepared and eaten in twenty minutes, and refilling the kettle for breakfast he lay smoking in a hollow between the great roots which crawled away from a cedar-trunk.  Nothing moved in the bush now but a bear that was grubbing amidst the wild cabbage in a swamp, and the weary man, stretching out his hand instinctively to touch the rifle that lay within his reach, gave himself up to thought.  He had also much to occupy him, and being a somewhat systematic person he proceeded to consider the questions that demanded an answer in what appeared to him their order of importance.  It was characteristic that in face of recent events he placed the probable whereabouts of the silver first.

This was at the first glance a somewhat difficult problem.  In front of him lay the wilderness, a trackless chaos of forest and rock and snow wherein he had to find the scar made by a stick of giant powder or the scratching of the shovel.  There were, however, points to guide the searcher, and Alton could deduce a good deal from each of them.  Jimmy the prospector had, it was evident, perished of hunger