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She was right. The miners were struggling with the demons of desire and ready to stampede at any moment. Hastily packing his mule, Bidwell started up the trail, saying:

“Fall in behind me, boys, and don’t scrouge. The man who tries to crowd me off the trail will regret it.”

They were quiet enough till he left the trail and started down toward the Bear. Then Johnson cried, “I know where it is!” and plunged with a whoop into the thicket of willows that bordered the creek.

“Mebbe he does and mebbe he don’t,” said Clark. “I’m going to stick by Bid till we get the lay o’ the land.”

They maintained fairly good order until Bidwell’s trail became a plain line leading up the hillside; then the stampede began. With wild halloos and resounding thwacking of mules they scattered out, raced over the hilltop, and disappeared, leaving Bidwell to plod on with his laden burro.

When he came in sight of his mine men were hammering stakes into the ground on all sides of the discovery claim, and Clark and Johnson were in a loud wrangle as to who reached the spot first. Leading his mule up to the cliff wall where he had built a shelter, Bidwell unpacked his outfit, and as he stood his rifle against a rock he said:

“I’m planted right here, neighbors. My roots run deep underground, and the man who tries to jump this claim will land in the middle of hell fire–now, that’s right.”

Their claims once staked and their loud differences stilled, the men had leisure to come and examine the discovery claim.

“You’ve the best of it,” said Cantor, an old miner. “There may not be an ounce of gold outside your vein. It’s a curious formation; I can’t tell how it runs.”

Toward night the other miners left and went back to camp, leaving Bidwell alone. As darkness came on he grew nervous again. “They’d kill me if they dared,” he muttered, as he crouched in his shelter, his gun on his knee. He was very sleepy, but resolved not to close his eyes. “If I only had a dog–some one I could trust; but I haven’t a soul,” he added, bitterly, as his weakness grew. The curse of gold sat heavily upon him and his hands were lax with weariness.

“I was a fool to let Maggie go off with that ore,” he muttered, his mind following the widow in her perilous journey down the gulch. He did not distrust her; he only feared her ability to override the difficulties of her mission. For the best part of his life he had sought the metal beneath his feet, and, now that he had found it, his blood ran cold with suspicion and fear.

Daylight brought a comparative sense of safety, and, building a fire, he cooked his breakfast in peace–though his eyes were restless. “Oh, they’ll come,” he said, aloud. “They’ll boil in here on me in another hour or two.”

And they did. The men from Delaney came first, followed a little later by their partners from the high gulches, and after them the genuine stampeders. The merchants, clerks, hired hands, barbers, hostlers, and half-starved lawyers from the valley towns came pouring up the trail and, pausing just long enough to see the shine of gold in Bidwell’s dump, flung themselves upon the land, seizing the first unclaimed contiguous claim without regard to its character or formation. Their stakes once set, they began to roam, pawing at the earth like prairie-dogs and quite as ineffectually. Swarms of the most curious surrounded Bidwell’s hole in the ground, picking at the ore and flooding the air with shouts and questions till the old man in desperation ordered them off his premises and set up a notice:

“Keep off this ground or meet trouble!”

To his friends he explained, “Every piece of rock they carry off is worth so much money.”

“Ye’ve enough here to buy the warrld, mon,” protested Angus Craig, an old miner from the north.