Silvertip's Roundup by Max Brand Page B

the eventual line which, as it seemed to him, Feeley had been walking along.
    By the time he came out of the heavy press of the pines to the comparative open, he found that his line of march pointed straight at a confusion of big mountain slopes. It was close to dusk. The sun was going down and he knew that he would have to wait until the next day before he resumed his work.
    He did not return to the cabin. It seemed too dangerous a business. Therefore he took Parade a hundred yards away into a clearing where some good grass was growing. He had for his supper hard-tack and water out of a runlet. Then, while it was still faintly light, he rolled himself in a blanket on a bed of heaped pine needles and went to sleep.
    A pale moon looked down and wakened him once during the night. Then he slept again until the first morning light commenced. The air was almost as cold as frost, but when he got up, he stripped and washed himself at that runlet of snow water. By the time the morning gray had turned to rose and the mountains were no longer black against the sky but beginning to take on some of the dawn color, he had breakfasted on a piece of hard-tack and was back at his work.
    He was disheartened when he discovered how little ground he had covered the day before. But now, calculating his line with the greatest care, he saw that it pointed straight toward a mountain with a big, round-bellied slope that poured down to the south, opposite him. He gave up that step-by-step trailing and marched straight off to make a two-mile cast ahead.
    The end of his march found him on the breast of the mountain stepping over shimmering rocks without a sign of footmarks anywhere about him. Nevertheless, as the heat increased, he went over the ground inch by inch. Anything, a single impression was all that he asked for. It was nearly noon before he gave up the task.
    If the rocks showed nothing, perhaps it was simply because no foot had happened to strike on one of the few bits of soil that filled the hollows among the stones. Therefore he cast straight ahead over the mountain.
    Again there was nothing before him.
    Parade began to grow impatient. He had followed at the heels of his master during all of this time without finding more than a few salty shrubs to graze at. Now he started walking around and around Silver in a narrowing circle. It took a matter of life or death to close the mind of Silver to the wants of his horse, but life or death was exactly what might be in the balance now. So he went on through the fierce heat of the afternoon, rather hopelessly, because there was no sign of a watercourse before him or to either side. It seemed as if water could never have been there, but as though this terrible sun must always have dried the rocks to the core.
    He stood up from the vain survey of a stretch of gravel when he heard a light rushing sound like wind in the distance. No wind came to him, however, though the sound continued. He hurried forward and found himself on the bank of a little stream that ran fast as though down a flume. There was no ravine. There were no trees to mark the course. There was simply this trench slanted across the face of the rock. And Silver felt that he had found what he wanted, at last.

XIV
The Placer
    H E climbed down the bank and looked at the water. Everything about this creek was extraordinary, but nothing more so than the fact that the little river had been able to pick up so much mud in the course of its journey across solid rock! It should have been as limpid as crystal!
    It pointed, however, straight as a rifle barrel across the slope and into the mouth of a small valley filled with stunted pines, for the elevation was great and timber line was not so very high above them. In that valley the stream might pick up soil, though it was strange that there was such variation in the degree of muddiness. As Silver watched, he saw the current run almost clear, while the next moment it was clouded brown again.
    He put