Oliver had seen bees darting like arrows from the flowers in the creekbed in a westerly direction, up over the thickest of the chaparral. Up there somewhere was another colony of winged misers and their hoarded wealth of honey. Honey was bringing a good price just then, and a merchant at Halfmoon Flat would buy it. So now the beeman climbed the hill and crawled into the chaparral in the direction the insects had flown. Scattered here and there through the dense thicket were pines and spruce and black oak. In one of these trees the bees must have their home; and his task of finding it was not entirely a haphazard quest. When he crawled to an opening in the bushes he would climb into the crotch of one of them and locate the nearest tree. Then, flattening himself once more, he would crawl to this tree and look for a hollow for the bees. Finding none, he would locate another tree and crawl to it. Thus wearisomely engaged he crawled into a depression three feet deep in the earth beneath him. This allowed him to sit erect for the first time in minutes, and he availed himself of the chance, industriously mopping his brow. Now, Oliver Drew was not a miner, but he was a son of the outdoor West and knew at once that he was seated in an ancient prospect hole. About the excavation were piled the dirt and stones that had been shovelled out. He speculated over it. For all he knew, it might date back to the fascinating days of '49. A great forest of pines might have stood here then. Or maybe the pines had been burned away, and a forest of gigantic oaks had followed the conifers, to rear themselves majestically above the pigmies that delved, oftimes impotently, for the glittering yellow treasure at their roots. Or, again, the prospect hole might have been dug years later, after the oaks had disappeared and the chaparral had claimed the land. There was no way of telling, for every decade or so forest fires swept the country almost clean, and some new growth superseded the old in Nature's endless cycle. Fifty feet farther on he plopped into a second prospect hole, and a little beyond that he found a third. He noted now that in all cases no chaparral grew up through the muck that had been thrown out. This would seem to signify that the work had been done in recent years, while the bushes that now claimed the land still grew there. He found a fourth hole soon, and near it were manzanita stumps, the tops of which had been cut off with an ax. This settled it. While the soil might show evidences of the work of man for an interminable length of time, the roots of the lopped-off manzanitas would rot in a decade, perhaps, and freezing weather would loosen the stumps from their moorings. But this wood was still sound. The prospecting had been done not many years before. And who had been prospecting thus on patented land?