Rawley nodded, having no words for what he felt. There was something inexpressibly melancholy in this desolation where his grandfather had found riotous life. Of the fortunes gathered here, the fortunes lost--of the hopes fulfilled and the hopes crushed slowly in long, monotonous days of toil and disappointment--what man could tell? Only the river, rushing heedlessly past as it had hurried, all those years ago, to meet the lumbering little river boats struggling against its current with their burden of human emotions, only the river might have told how the town was born,--and how it had died. Or the grim hills standing there as they had stood since the land was in the making, looking down with saturnine calm upon the puny endeavors of men whose lives would soon enough cease upon earth and be forgotten. Rawley’s boot toe struck against something in the loose gravel,--a child’s shoe with the toe worn to a gaping mouth, the heel worn down to the last on the outer edge: dry as a bleached bone, warped by many a storm, blackened, doleful. Even a young man setting out in quest of his fortune, with a picturesque secret code in his pocket, may be forgiven for sending a thought after the child who had scuffed that coarse little shoe down here in El Dorado. But presently Johnny Buffalo, leading the way briskly, his sharp old eyes taking in everything within their range as if he were eagerly verifying his memories of the place, turned from the trail along the river and entered the hills. His moccasined feet clung tenaciously to the steep places where Rawley’s high-laced mining boots slipped. The sun rays struck them fiercely and the “little stinging gnats” which Grandfather King had mentioned in his diary were there to pester them, poising vibrantly just before the eyes as if they waited only the opportunity to dart between the lids. The thought that perhaps his grandfather had come that way, fifty years ago, filled the toil of climbing up the long gully with a peculiar interest. Fifty years ago these hills must have looked much the same. Fifty years ago, the prospect holes they passed occasionally may have been fresh-turned earth and rocks. Men searching for rich silver and gold might have been seen plodding along the hillsides; but the hills themselves could not have changed much. His grandfather had looked upon all this, and had divided his thoughts, perhaps, between the gold and his latest infatuation, the half-breed girl, Anita. And suddenly Rawley put a vague speculation into words: “Hey, Johnny! Here’s a good place to make a smoke, in the shade.” He waited until the Indian had retraced the dozen steps between them. “Johnny, there was a beautiful half-breed girl here, when Grandfather made his last trip up the river. She was half Spanish. My grandfather mentioned her once or twice in his diary. Do you remember her?” “There were many beautiful girls in my tribe,” Johnny Buffalo retorted drily. “What name did he call her?”