Next he threw into a wheelbarrow drills, spoon, tamping stick, gads, drill-hammer, rock-hammer, canteen, shovel and pick--taking care, even in his haste, to select a properly matched set of drills--and trundled the barrow up the drift at a pace which would give a Miners' Union the rabies. At the breast, he unshipped his cargo in right miner's fashion, the drills in a graduated stepladder row along the wall; loaded the barrow with broken ore, a bit of charred fuse showing at the top, and wheeled it out at the same unprofessional gait, leaving it on the dump just above the spot where his late sepulchral rites had freshened the appearance of the sunbeaten dump. He next performed his ablutions in an amateurish and perfunctory fashion, scrupulously observing a well-defined waterline. "There!" said Mr. Long. "I near made a break that time!" He went back to the barrow and trundled it assiduously to the tunnel's mouth and back several times, carefully never in quite the same place--finally leaving it not above the sepulchered spoil, but near the ore stack, as befitted its valuable contents. "I got to think of everything. One wrong break'll fix me good!" said Mr. Long. He felt his neck delicately, as if he detected some foreign presence there. "In the tunnel, now, there's only the one place where the wheel can go; so it don't matter so much in there." The fire having now burned down to proper coals, Mr. Long set about supper; with the corner of his eye on the lookout for the pursuers of the late Bransford. He set the coffee-pot by the fire--they were now in the edge of the tar-brush; there were only two of them. He put on a pot of potatoes in their jackets--he could see them plainly, diminutive black horsemen twinkling through the brush; he sliced bacon into a frying-pan and put it aside to await his cue; he disposed other cooking ware in lifelike attitudes near the fire--they were in the long shadow of Double Mountain; their horses were jaded; they rode slowly. He dropped the sour-dough jar and placed the broken pieces where they would be inconspicuously visible. Having thus a perfectly obvious excuse for not having sour-dough bread, which requires thirty-six hours of running start for preliminary rising, Jeff--Mr. Tobe Long--mixed up a just-as-good baking-powder substitute--they rode like young men; they rode like young men not to the saddle born, and Tobe permitted himself a chuckle: "By hooky, I've got an even chance for my little bluff!" He shook his head reprovingly at himself for this last admission. With every minute he looked more like Tobe Long than ever--if only there had been any Tobe Long to look like. His mind ran upon nuggets, pockets, placers, faults, true fissure veins, the cyanide process, concentrates, chlorides, sulphides, assays, leases and bonds; his face took on the strained wistfulness which marks the confirmed prospector: he _was_ Tobe Long! The bell rang. CHAPTER XII THE SIEGE OF DOUBLE MOUNTAIN