He took his pick in his hands the following day, but placed it again in its corner, slowly, after a moment’s examination of its blunted steel.

Three days went by.  The weather was colder.  Bitter winds and frowning clouds were hastening somewhere to a conclave of the wintry elements.  It was four days only to Christmas.  Neither the promised Noah’s ark to present to tiny Skeezucks nor the Christmas-tree on which the men had planned to hang their gifts was one whit nearer to realization than as if they had never been suggested.

Meantime, once again the food-supply was nearly gone.  Keno kept the pile of fuel reasonably high, but cheer was not so prevalent in the cabin as to ask for further room.  The grave little pilgrim was just a trifle quieter and less inclined to eat.  He caught a cold, as tiny as himself, but bore its miseries uncomplainingly.  In fact, he had never cried so much as once since his coming to the cabin; and neither had he smiled.

In sheer concern old Jim went forth that cold and windy afternoon of the day but four removed from Christmas, to make at least a show of working on his claim.  Keno, Skeezucks, and the pup remained behind, the little red-headed man being busily engaged in some great culinary mystery from which he said his lemon-pie for Christmas should evolve.

When presently Jim stood beside the meagre post-hole he had made once upon a time, as a starter for a mining-shaft, he looked at it ruefully.  How horridly hard that rock appeared!  What a wretched little scar it was he had made with all that labor he remembered so vividly!  What was the good of digging here?  Nothing!

Dragging his pick, he looked for a softer spot in which to sink the steel.  There were no softer spots.  And the pick helve grew so intensely cold!  Jim dropped it to the ground, and with hands thrust into his armpits, for the warmth afforded, he hunched himself dismally and scanned the prospect with doleful eyes.  Why couldn’t the hill break open, anyhow, and show whether anything worth the having were contained in its bulk or not?

A last summer’s mullen stock, beating incessantly in the wind, seemed the only thing alive on all that vast outbulging of the earth.  The stunted brush stiffly carded the breeze that blew so persistently.

From rock to rock the gray old miner’s gaze went wandering.  So undisturbed had been the surface of the earth since he had owned the claim that a shallow channel, sluiced in the earth by a freshet of the spring long past, remained as the waters had cut it.  Slowly up the course of this insignificant cicatrice old Jim ascended, his hands still held beneath his arms, his long mustache and his grizzled beard blown awry in the breeze.  The pick he left behind.

Coming thus to a deeper gouge in the sand of the hill, he halted and gazed attentively at a thick seam of rock outcropping sharply where the long-gone freshet had laid it bare.  In mining parlance it was “quartzy.”  To Jim it appeared even more.  He stooped above it and attempted to break away a fragment with his fingers.  At this he failed.  Rubbing off the dust and sand wherewith old mother nature was beginning to cover it anew, he saw little spots, at which he scratched with his nails.