The simile of a “nest” as applied to the cabin of the brothers was no mere figure of speech as the light of the lantern first flashed upon it. The narrow ledge before the door was strewn with feathers. A suggestion that it might be the home and haunt of predatory birds was promptly checked by the spectacle of the nailed-up carcasses of a dozen hawks against the walls, and the outspread wings of an extended eagle emblazoning the gable above the door, like an armorial bearing. Within the cabin the walls and chimney-piece were dazzlingly bedecked with the party-colored wings of jays, yellow-birds, woodpeckers, kingfishers, and the poly-tinted wood-duck. Yet in that dry, highly-rarefied atmosphere, there was not the slightest suggestion of odor or decay. The first speaker hung the lantern upon a hook that dangled from the rafters, and, going to the broad chimney, kicked the half-dead embers into a sudden resentful blaze. He then opened a rude cupboard, and, without looking around, called, “Ruth!” The second speaker turned his head from the open doorway where he was leaning, as if listening to something in the darkness, and answered abstractedly,-- “Rand!” “I don't believe you have touched grub to-day!” Ruth grunted out some indifferent reply. “Thar hezen't been a slice cut off that bacon since I left,” continued Rand, bringing a side of bacon and some biscuits from the cupboard, and applying himself to the discussion of them at the table. “You're gettin' off yer feet, Ruth. What's up?” Ruth replied by taking an uninvited seat beside him, and resting his chin on the palms of his hands. He did not eat, but simply transferred his inattention from the door to the table. “You're workin' too many hours in the shaft,” continued Rand. “You're always up to some such d--n fool business when I'm not yer.” “I dipped a little west to-day,” Ruth went on, without heeding the brotherly remonstrance, “and struck quartz and pyrites.” “Thet's you!--allers dippin' west or east for quartz and the color, instead of keeping on plumb down to the 'cement'!”* * The local name for gold-bearing alluvial drift,--the bed of a prehistoric river. “We've been three years digging for cement,” said Ruth, more in abstraction than in reproach,--“three years!” “And we may be three years more,--may be only three days. Why, you couldn't be more impatient if--if--if you lived in a valley.”