“No, I’m all right. But--yes, there is! I almost forgot. I’ve some letters I wish you would take down to the nearest rural box and drop in for me to-morrow. And if there’s anything comes for me, it will be dropped in your box, and you might keep them till I come down, or--maybe it will be better to bring them up when you come again. No, I’m going to stay here a while longer. I like this place.” He stopped, and then chuckled as if amused. “For sporting it’s rather a failure. You see Uncle Bill doesn’t like to have me catch more than six trout per day. He doesn’t know it, but I’ve been fly-fishing with a barbless hook for two days now, and throwing some beauties back into the stream rather than hurt his feelings. S-s-sh! Here he comes.” After the partners left that night Heald and Old Harmless sat for a long time, smoking, and saying never a word, as if quite content with each other’s voiceless company. The moon had lifted upward and the great gulch was still save for the distant crooning sound of the brook that seemed doing an elfin dance over rocks and bowlders. “The phonygraft is wonderful,” said the old man at last; “but--but somehow I always come back ter that there music you hear out there.” He pointed with the stem of his pipe at the stream. “It’s the only music that I don’t seem ter ever hear twice alike. It’s got tunes that’s always new. Sometimes they’re angry tunes, in the spring time when the snows is meltin’. Then in about a month it’s a busy tune, as if it was sayin’, ‘Got ter git all this extry water off’n my hands, Bill, and hustle it along ter the sea, and after that when things is right again, and summer comes an’ there ain’t nobody here but God and me an’ you, I’ll try ter sing you the same songs you’ve loved for more’n fifty year.’ “Sometimes that there creek sings things that hurts a little, as if croonin’ for them that’s asleep up on that flat bench over there on the west side of that shoulder you can see. When there was a camp here in this gulch in the early ’sixties we got the smallpox. It was purty bad. Most everybody skipped out, but them that was sick--and me. I stayed on ter nuss ’em, because, you see, if I hadn’t found gold here, nobody would have come, and nobody would have died, and--and--so I felt sort of responsible like and--just stuck it out. There’s eighteen men and one woman--not what I reckon some folks might call a good woman, although I know her heart was all right--that are all asleep on that hill. I buried ’em all myself when there wasn’t no one ter help. And I kept up the place where they was asleep until one time I was away from here four or five year, and when I come back there was a lot of rhododendrons growin’ over ’em, and then I knowed that, although I’d been gone the Lord hadn’t forgotten ’em, and --purty soon the rhododendrons’ll be in bloom again. The patch that grows the biggest and purtiest flowers seems to be over the camp woman’s grave.”