"You _are_ rickety," Black Jack told him. "Why, there ain't any danger; nobody goes up there." Laughing Bill held his breath, missing not a word. "If they did we'd pick 'em up with the glasses. It's open country, and we'd get 'em before they got down." "I s'pose so. But the nights are getting dark." "Nobody's out at night, either, you boob. I ain't losing any slumber over that. And I ain't going to lose any about your quitting ahead of me. That don't trouble me none." Berg yawned and changed the subject. Half an hour later he rose, languidly undressed and rolled into his bed. Slevin followed suit shortly after, and the rapidity with which both men fell asleep spoke volumes for the elasticity of the human conscience. Now, Laughing Bill had come prepared to spend the night, but his throat tickled and he had a distressing habit of snoring, therefore he deemed it the part of caution to depart before he dropped off into the land of dreams. He effected the manoeuver noiselessly. Bill lingered at the spring hole on the following morning, and lost himself in an attentive study of the surrounding scenery. It was fairly impressive scenery, and he had a keen appreciation of nature's beauty, but Black Jack's words continued to puzzle him. "Nobody goes up there." Up where? The Aurora lay in a valley, therefore most of the country round about was "up"--it was open, too. The ridges were bold and barren, garbed only with shreds and patches of short grass and reindeer moss. "We'd pick 'em up with the glasses--we'd get 'em before they got down." Manifestly the cache was in plain sight, if one only knew where to look for it, but Mr. Hyde's sharp eyes took in ten thousand likely hiding-places, and he reasoned that it would be worse than folly to go exploring blindly without more definite data than he possessed. It was clever of the pair to hide the swag where they could oversee it every hour of the day, and they had chosen a safe location, too, for nobody wasted the effort to explore those domes and hogbacks now that they were known to contain no quartz. There was Anvil Mountain, for instance, a bold schist peak crowned with a huge rock in the likeness of a blacksmith's anvil. It guarded the entrance to the valley, rising from the very heart of the best mining section; it was the most prominent landmark hereabouts, but not a dozen men had ever climbed it, and nowadays nobody did.