"Well, it's this-a-way; I'm off on a prospectin' tower to-morrow. Blowed in ever' last thing I had, and took a grub-stake, same as heretofore. Now the old man that puts up the grub-stake, he says, says he, 'Jim, you'll want a pardner. It's gettin' pretty late in the season, and you won't stand no kind of a chance goin' alone.' 'Right you are,' says I,' and I'll pick up some feller on the range as I go in.' 'Good enough,' says he. 'I'll make this here order big enough to stake the two of you.' That's the whole lay-out, and you're the pardner, if you say the word. You don't know beans about me, and I don't know you from Adam's off ox, so that's a stand-off. What do you say?" Jeffard did not answer until there was but a bare thread of sky between the star and the peak. Then he said: "Do you happen to have a coin of any kind about you?" Garvin tossed a dollar across to him, and Jeffard spun it. Then he found that he had no match, and asked the miner to give him one. Garvin watched him curiously as he bent over the coin and struck the match. "The luck's against me--it's heads," he announced gravely. "I'll go with you." Garvin rose and stretched himself stiffly. "You're a cool one," he commented. "What if it'd been tails?" Jeffard got up and kicked the brick into the pond. "In that case I should have been obliged to ask you to lend me your pistol. Let's go back to town and get something to eat with that dollar. I haven't had anything since last night." CHAPTER XI AFTER toiling all night through black gorges and over unspeakable mountain passes, the narrow-gauge train from Denver, headed by two pygmy locomotives, came out into daylight, sunshine, and wider horizons at Alta Vista. In the sleeping-car three sections had been transformed by the drowsy porter into daytime smugness, and three persons--two of them in deference to the enthusiasm of the third--were up and dressed. "Isn't it all perfectly indescribable?" Myra was saying, when the engineer of one of the pygmies sounded the whistle for the station. "Do you know, I couldn't go to sleep for hours last night, late as it was. I put up the window curtain and piled the pillows in the corner so I could look out. The sky was like a great inverted bowl lined with black velvet and spangled with diamonds, circling around us as we darted around the curves. And in the open places there was always a solemn procession of cliffs and peaks, marching with us sometimes, and then turning to slip past again when the bowl whirled the other way. Oh, but it was grand!"