From the tent emerged a woman with her buckets.  The water man placed the hose-end to his mouth, applied a lusty suction, and the water came gushing forth.  He filled both receptacles, collected the price, and then drove on to the next.

Sardonically Van reflected that even the fine little stream of water on his claim, in a land where water was so terribly scarce, was absolutely worthless as an asset.  It was over a mountain ridge of such tremendous height that it might as well have been in the forests of Maine.

Despite the utter hopelessness of his present situation, his spirits were not depressed.  Gettysburg, he reflected, was a genius for bumping into queer old prospectors—­relics of the days of forty-nine, still eagerly pursuing their ignis fatuous of gold—­and from some such desert wanderer he would doubtless soon pick up a claim.  There was nothing like putting Gettysburg upon the scent.

Van wrote a note to his partners.

“Dear Fellow Mourners: 

“Have just discovered a joke.  I was salted on the ‘See Saw’ property.  Our pipe dream is defunct.  Have gone over to lay out remains.  If you find any oldtimers who have just discovered some lost bonanza, take them into camp.  Don’t get drunk, get busy.  Be back a little after noon.”

This he left with the hay-yard man where his partners would stop when they arrived.  Mounted on Suvy, his outlaw of the day before, he rode from Goldite joyously.  After all, what was the odds?  He had been no better off than now at least a hundred times.  At the worst he still had his partners and his horse, a breakfast aboard, and a mountain ahead to climb.

Indeed, at the light of friendship in his broncho’s eyes, as well as at the pony’s neigh of welcome, back there at the yard, he had felt a boundless pleasure in his veins.  He patted the chestnut’s neck, in his rough, brusque way of companionship, and the horse fairly quivered with pleasure.

For nearly two hours the willing animal went zig-zagging up the rocky slopes.  The day was warming; the sun was a naked disk of fire.  It was hard climbing.  Van had chosen the shorter, steeper way across the range.  From time to time, where the barren ascent was exceptionally severe, he swung from the saddle and led the broncho on, to mount further up as before.

Thus they came in time to a zone of change, over one of the ridges, a region where rocks and ugliness gave way to a growth of brush and stunted trees.  These were the outposts, ragged, dwarfed, and warped, of a finer growth beyond.

Fifteen miles away, down between the hills, flowed a tortuous stream, by courtesy called a river.  It sometimes rose in a turgid flood, but more often it sank and delivered up its ghost to such an extent that a man could have held it in his hat.  Nevertheless some greenery flourished on its banks.

When Van at last could oversee the vast, unpeopled lands of the Piute Indian reservation, near the boundary of which his salted claim had been staked, he had only a mile or so to ride, and all the way down hill.