from him with a genuine regret, and a hope that he would soon be overtaken by his friends along the road.  “And mind that you ain’t such a fool agin to let ’em make you tote their dod-blasted tools fur them!” he added unsuspectingly, pointing to Clarence’s mining outfit.  Thus saved the heaviest part of the day’s journey, for the road was continually rising from the plains during the last six miles, Clarence was yet able to cover a considerable distance on foot before he halted for supper.  Here he was again fortunate.  An empty lumber team watering at the same spring, its driver offered to take Clarence’s purchases—­for the boy had profited by his late friend’s suggestion to personally detach himself from his equipment—­to Buckeye Mills for a dollar, which would also include a “shakedown passage” for himself on the floor of the wagon.  “I reckon you’ve been foolin’ away in Sacramento the money yer parents give yer for return stage fare, eh?  Don’t lie, sonny,” he added grimly, as the now artful Clarence smiled diplomatically, “I’ve been thar myself!” Luckily, the excuse that he was “tired and sleepy” prevented further dangerous questioning, and the boy was soon really in deep slumber on the wagon floor.

He awoke betimes to find himself already in the mountains.  Buckeye Mills was a straggling settlement, and Clarence prudently stopped any embarrassing inquiry from his friend by dropping off the wagon with his equipment as they entered it, and hurriedly saying “Good-by” from a crossroad through the woods.  He had learned that the nearest mining camp was five miles away, and its direction was indicated by a long wooden “flume,” or water-way, that alternately appeared and disappeared on the flank of the mountain opposite.  The cooler and drier air, the grateful shadow of pine and bay, and the spicy balsamic odors that everywhere greeted him, thrilled and exhilarated him.  The trail plunging sometimes into an undisturbed forest, he started the birds before him like a flight of arrows through its dim recesses; at times he hung breathlessly over the blue depths of canyons where the same forests were repeated a thousand feet below.  Towards noon he struck into a rude road—­evidently the thoroughfare of the locality—­and was surprised to find that it, as well as the adjacent soil wherever disturbed, was a deep Indian red.  Everywhere, along its sides, powdering the banks and boles of trees with its ruddy stain, in mounds and hillocks of piled dirt on the road, or in liquid paint-like pools, when a trickling stream had formed a gutter across it, there was always the same deep sanguinary color.  Once or twice it became more vivid in contrast with the white teeth of quartz that peeped through it from the hillside or crossed the road in crumbled strata.  One of those pieces Clarence picked up with a quickening pulse.  It was veined and streaked with shining mica and tiny glittering cubes of mineral that looked like gold!