IN his westward sweep over the Titanic playground of farther Colorado, the sun looks down into a narrow valley through which tumbles a brawling stream whose waters, snow-born within rifle-shot, go to swell the canyoned flood of the Gunnison River. Fir-clad mountains, sombre green to timber-line and fallow dun or dazzling white above it, according to the season, stand like a cordon of mighty sentinels around and about; and the foot of civilized man treading the sward of the park-like valley must first have measured many weary miles of the mountain wilderness. Notwithstanding its apparent inaccessibility, and its remoteness from any hoof-worn trail, the valley had once been inhabited. The evidences were a rude log cabin, with its slab door hanging by a single leathern hinge, buttressing a weathered cliff on the western bank of the stream; and, in the opposing mountain slope, a timbered opening bearded with a gray dump of débris, marking the entrance to a prospect tunnel. Cabin and tunnel were both the handiwork of James Garvin. On one of his many prospecting tours he had penetrated to the shut-in valley; and finding a promise of mineral deposits in the slopes of the sentinel mountains, had gone into permanent camp and driven the prospect tunnel into the rocky hillside. When he had done something more than the development work necessary to hold the claim, two things conspired to drive him forth of the valley. His provisions ran low; and the indications in the tunnel, which had pointed to a silver-bearing lode of graphic tellurium, changed suddenly at a "dike" in the strata, and disappeared altogether. Garvin was a stubborn man, and the toxin of the prospector's fever was in his blood. Wherefore he put himself upon siege rations and delved against time. When he had baked his last skillet of panbread and fired his last charge of dynamite in the heading, the dike was still unpenetrated. After that, there was nothing for it but retreat; and he reluctantly broke camp and left the valley, meaning to return when he could. Two years elapsed and the opportunity still tarried; but Garvin kept the shut-in valley in mind, and it was thitherward he turned his face when Stephen Elliott's liberal "grub-stake," and the hastily formed partnership with Jeffard, provided the means and the help necessary to sink a shaft. It was in the afternoon of a cloudless August day that Jeffard had his first glimpse of the park-like valley lying in the lap of the sentinel mountains. The air was crisp and thin-edged with the keen breath of the altitudes, but the untempered heat of the sun beat pitilessly upon the heads of the two men picking their laborious way over the rock-ribbed shoulder of the least precipitous mountain. "Well, pardner, we've riz the last o' the hills," quoth Garvin, stepping aside to let the burro, with its jangling burden of camp utensils and provisions, precede him. "How d'you stack up by this time?"