McCleod came up to Tavernake one day with a dull-looking lump in his hand, glistening in places.

“Copper,” he announced, shortly.  “It’s what I’ve been looking for all the time.  No end to it.  There’s something bigger than oil here.”

They spent a month in the locality, and every day McCleod became more enthusiastic.  After that it was hard work to keep him from heading homeward at once.

“I tell you, sir,” he explained to Tavernake, “there’s millions there, millions between those four stakes of yours.  What’s the good of more prospecting?  There’s enough there in a square acre to pay the expenses of our expedition a thousand times over.  Let’s get back and make reports.  We can strike the railway in ten days from here—­perhaps sooner.”

“You go,” Tavernake said.  “Leave me Pete and two of the horses.”

The man stared at him in surprise.

“What’s the good of going on alone?” he asked.  “You’re not a mining expert or an oil man.  You can’t go prospecting by yourself.”

“I can’t help it,” Tavernake answered.  “It’s something in my blood, I suppose.  I am going on.  Think!  You’ll strike that railway and in a month you will be back in New York.  Don’t you imagine, when you’re there, when you hear the clatter and turmoil of it, when you see the pale crowds chivvying one another about to pick the dollars from each other’s pockets,—­don’t you believe you’ll long for these solitudes, the big empty places, great possibilities, the silence?  Think of it, man.  What is there beyond those mountains, I wonder?”

McCleod sighed.

“You’re right,” he said.  “One may never get so far out again.  Our fortunes will keep, I suppose, and anyhow we ought to strike a telegraph station in about a fortnight.  We’ll go right ahead, then.”

In ten days they dropped ten thousand feet.  They came to a land where their throats were always dry, where the trees and shrubs seemed like property affairs from a theatre, where they plunged their heads into every pool that came to wash their noses and mouths from the red dust that seemed to choke them up.  They found tin and oil and more copper.  Then, by slow stages, they passed on to a land of great grassy plains, of blue grass, miles and miles of it, and suddenly one day they came to the telegraph posts, rough pine trees unstripped of their bark, with a few sagging wires.  Tavernake looked at them as Robinson Crusoe might have looked at Man Friday’s footsteps.  It was the first sign of human life which they had seen for months.

“It’s a real world we are in, after all!” he sighed.  “Somehow or other, I thought—­I thought we’d escaped.”

CHAPTER VIII

BACK TO CIVILIZATION