"Ah!" spoke Mr. Villard, recognizing them, in the dusk. "If you wish to ask Mr. Green Russell anything, here he is." "Yes; we want to ask him if he remembers a man in his party of last summer by the name of Jones," said Harry, quickly, for it was apparent that Messrs. Villard and Russell were in a hurry. "I shorely do," responded Mr. Russell. He was a broad-shouldered man, with sparse beard and long-pointed moustache--had a cool eye and a deliberate speech. "He is this boy's father," continued Harry. "He came home with some dust and claimed to have located a mine about a day's travel from here, on the Platte." "If that was Fifty-eight, 'tain't wuth looking after now," decided Mr. Russell. "Too close in. I reckon it was yonder whar we had some dry diggin's that we-all worked out, 'round Placer Camp." "Captain Russell's an old miner, you know," put in Mr. Villard. "He's prospected through here pretty closely, since he came out first, and so have his brothers; and they're convinced that the only paying mines will be found in the mountains." "Yes," drawled Mr. Russell. "These hyar sandy creeks peter out. You have to get up higher, into the gravel and rock." He and Mr. Villard passed on, only to be repeatedly stopped and questioned in their progress. "That settles us, I think," said Harry, as he and Terry turned for their camp. "We'll pack Jenny and light out for the Gregory Gulch region. We've got to have a mine ready for your father when he comes, so as to pay him back the 'grub-stake.'" "And another ready for George to work," reminded Terry. "He'll expect an elephant, too." As the two partners recrossed the foot-bridge into Denver City, night had cloaked the mountains in the west and had enfolded all the plains. Down here lights flickered in tents and through the chinking of windowless, floorless and sometimes roofless cabins, twinkled among the other gold-seekers' camps spread over the broken brush, and on the trails in north and south and yonder for Gregory Gulch. CHAPTER X FORWARD MARCH TO GREGORY GULCH "What'll we do with all our gunny sacks?" queried Terry, when after an early breakfast they drove across for Auraria, to deliver Duke and the cart and make their purchases. "They don't weigh much, but they take up a lot of room. I have a scheme, though," answered Harry. Early as they were, the emigrant camps on the plain, and Denver City and Auraria in the midst, were astir: smoke was welling from camp-fires and chimneys, shouts and calls arose as outfits prepared to journey onward, people were moving busily, and the procession beyond the Platte was wending in a long file mountain-ward. Already another announcement was displayed on Mr. Reilly's show tent. "Also (it said) the Only Genuine Wild Buffalo Now in Captivity, and the Identical Wagon That He Drew Across the Plains."