Silvertip's Roundup by Max Brand Page A

sapling poles and logs and thatch. Time had broken and warped and thinned it until the eye could glance out of it in almost any direction.
    Silver, standing on the floor of beaten earth, took heed of the bunk that was built against the wall, the fireplace of blackened stones that stood in front of the door, the homemade stool, the table made by stretching across a pair of large stones two logs which had been flattened by ax work. That was about all there was to see.
    There was a slight natural clearing in front of the shanty, and the pine trees shouldered up in close ranks all around this open place. The ground was rather rocky and thickly covered, in most places, by pine needles. There could hardly have been more unfavorable land for trailing, but that was what Silver had to do. Somewhere, from this starting point, one of the trails which Joe Feeley had made led to his gold strike. That trail Silver was determined to find.
    He disregarded the immediate vicinity of the cabin but entering the trees, he laid out several large circles which cut across semiclearings in the woods, where the soft soil would take and hold the print of feet. After a time he began to locate trails that went out and in.
    As for those which went out from the cabin, they made a hopeless proposition, because it seemed that Feeley, like the usual hunter, never went out in a fixed direction but left his cabin and rambled wherever fancy led him. It was plain that Silver could work for months on those signs without reaching a definite conclusion to his labor. The incoming trails, however, were more promising.
    Two or three of them, to be sure, clambered up the mountains from lower ground, but the majority came in from above. And the strongest and freshest of the trails, as Silver made out after careful study, raking away pine needles, comparing sign for sign, had been covered a number of times. It might be that this was the trail from the gold strike.
    In that case, it was rather strange that there were not tracks both incoming and outgoing. Since only incoming marks were visible, it might be that Feeley, fearing he might be observed, on each occasion had left his house and gone to his mine by a circuitous route. However, having arrived at the diggings and worked them, he probably had come back in a more or less straight line.
    One thing was fairly certain. From the rounded nature of the little nuggets in that bit of gold which Silver was carrying, it was reasonably sure that the metal was water-washed and shaped. Therefore he could look for some water-course, not necessarily a new one, but perhaps some dry old bed from which the stream had been turned in the process of time.
    Almost every step was a difficult one and meant dropping on his knees, often, to make sure of the impressions which he sought after. Sometimes, where there was a soft undermold and only a thin layer of pine needles on top, he scraped away the needles and found beneath them the sign he was looking for. He made ten failures for one success, but the successes eventually enabled him to chart a line, and the line of course gave him a direction.
    It was laborious work but it was exciting, too. The sun was very strong, but there were blowing clouds, high up, and when they crossed the sun, a wave of cool shadow washed across the mountain and left Silver in a dull twilight. But the next moment there would be sun again shining through the treetops and gleaming on the upper surfaces of the thick branches, and spilling through like sheets of gold leaf on the carpet of pine needles.
    Of course the trail had variations. If it were in fact laid down by the feet of Joe Feeley, he had not taken one single route even on his return trips, but had swung to the side here and there to avoid various trees or outcroppings of rock. Silver had to put together some dozen of these different routes before, in the end, he was able to mark the signs with a multitude of little twigs. From the twigs he finally charted