Thus for ten days they wandered through rocky gorges, and climbed the steep sides of hills, and returned to their camp for fresh supplies and a day or two of rest. The “great and high mountain” in the distance had seemed to recede before them as they walked. They had been three days in reaching its base. Another two days had served to take them over the top and down on the other side westward. There their trail seemed to end, for that side of the mountain was almost entirely covered with loose rubble of decomposed rock. There were no cliffs or jagged rocks anywhere that they could see. Since Peter had burned the code, and the list of references was in St. Louis with Grandfather’s Bible, they were compelled for the present to depend altogether on memory. But Rawley could repeat the code from beginning to end without hesitation. The only explanation, then, of their failure was that either he had made a mistake somewhere in writing down the marked passages or Grandfather King had marked them wrong. Rawley astonished Nevada somewhat by asking to borrow her Bible. But when he received it he could not remember the references, so that he was no better off than before. One thing was certain: the only great and high mountain within sight of El Dorado, looking north, with “Cedar trees in abundance scattered over the face of the high mountain” had no cliffs upon its western side. When the mountain itself failed to measure up with the description, the whole code fell flat. It was a big country, and it was a rough country. A man might spend a lifetime in the search. “My sergeant did not lie,” Johnny Buffalo contended stubbornly. “He was a great man. He did not make mistakes. When he said the gold was there, in the clefts of the jagged rocks, it was there. He said it.” “He said it--fifty years ago,” Rawley retorted rather impatiently. “I didn’t see any gold formation anywhere on that mountain. It’s true that ‘Gold is where you find it’; but it leaves earmarks in its particular neighborhood for the man who knows how to read the signs. If there is any gold on that mountain, some one carried it there.” “There is gold where my sergeant said there is gold,” Johnny Buffalo insisted. “I shall look until I find.”