But this morning he was not visible.  Young Jerry only was to be seen, sitting on the cabin step and singing the ancient chantey.  He had cooked and eaten his breakfast all by himself, and had just come out to take a look at the world.  Twenty feet before him stood the steel drum round which the endless cable worked.  By the drum, snug and fast, was the ore-car.  Following with his eyes the dizzy flight of the cables to the farther bank, he could see the other drum and the other car.

The contrivance was worked by gravity, the loaded car crossing the river by virtue of its own weight, and at the same time dragging the empty car back.  The loaded car being emptied, and the empty car being loaded with more ore, the performance could be repeated—­a performance which had been repeated tens of thousands of times since the day Old Jerry became the keeper of the cables.

Young Jerry broke off his song at the sound of approaching footsteps.  A tall, blue-shirted man, a rifle across the hollow of his arm, came out from the gloom of the pine-trees.  It was Hall, watchman of the Yellow Dragon mine, the cables of which spanned the Sacramento a mile farther up.

“Yello, younker!” was his greeting.  “What you doin’ here by your lonesome?”

“Oh, bachin’,” Jerry tried to answer unconcernedly, as if it were a very ordinary sort of thing.  “Dad’s away, you see.”

“Where’s he gone?” the man asked.

“San Francisco.  Went last night.  His brother’s dead in the old country, and he’s gone down to see the lawyers.  Won’t be back till tomorrow night.”

So spoke Jerry, and with pride, because of the responsibility which had fallen to him of keeping an eye on the property of the Yellow Dream, and the glorious adventure of living alone on the cliff above the river and of cooking his own meals.

“Well, take care of yourself,” Hall said, “and don’t monkey with the cables.  I’m goin’ to see if I can pick up a deer in the Cripple Cow Canon.”

“It’s goin’ to rain, I think,” Jerry said, with mature deliberation.

“And it’s little I mind a wettin’,” Hall laughed, as he strode away among the trees.

Jerry’s prediction concerning rain was more than fulfilled.  By ten o’clock the pines were swaying and moaning, the cabin windows rattling, and the rain driving by in fierce squalls.  At half past eleven he kindled a fire, and promptly at the stroke of twelve sat down to his dinner.

No out-of-doors for him that day, he decided, when he had washed the few dishes and put them neatly away; and he wondered how wet Hall was and whether he had succeeded in picking up a deer.

At one o’clock there came a knock at the door, and when he opened it a man and a woman staggered in on the breast of a great gust of wind.  They were Mr. and Mrs. Spillane, ranchers, who lived in a lonely valley a dozen miles back from the river.

“Where’s Hall?” was Spillane’s opening speech, and he spoke sharply and quickly.