About twice in every minute, Gary would stop, dip thumb and finger into the mortar, and bring up a pinch of pulverized rock at which he would squint with the wholly unconscious eagerness of a small boy. Naturally, since he was not flattening a nugget of solid gold in the mortar, he failed to see anything except once when he caught an unmistakable yellow gleam from a speck of gold almost half the size of a small pinhead. He gloated over that speck for a full minute before he shook it carefully back into the mortar. And then you should have heard him pound! He was all aquiver with hope and eager expectancy when at last he poured the pulverized quartz into the gold pan and went digging his heels down the bank to the water. Faith came forward and stood upon a dry rock, mewing and purring by turns, and waving her tail encouragingly while she watched him. Those who plod along the beaten trail toward commercial success can scarcely apprehend the thrill of winning from nature herself the symbol that promises fulfillment of hope and dreams coming true. The ardency of Gary’s desire was measurable only by the depth of his love for Patricia. For himself he had a man’s normal hunger for achievement. To discover a gold mine here in Johnnywater Cañon, to develop it in secret to the point where he could command what capital he needed for the making of a real mine, that in itself seemed to Gary a goal worth striving for. To fill Patricia’s hands with virgin gold which he had found for her, there spoke the primitive desire of man since the world was young; to bring the spoils of war or the chase and lay them, proud offering of love, at the feet of his Woman. Gary turned and tilted the pan, tenderly as a young mother cradles her first-born. He dipped and rocked and spilled the water carefully over the rim; dipped and rocked and tilted again. The three deep creases stood between his straight, dark eyebrows, but now they betokened eager concentration upon his work. At last, he poured clear water from the pan carefully, almost drop by drop. He tilted the pan slowly in the sunlight and bent his head, peering sharply into the pan. His heart seemed to be beating in his throat when he saw the trail of tiny yellow particles following sluggishly the spoonful of black sand when he tilted the pan. “I’ve got it, Steve,” he exclaimed, looking up over his shoulder. He caught his breath in the sudden realization that he was looking into the empty sunlight. Absorbed as he had been in the gold, the felt presence of Steve Carson looking over his shoulder had seemed perfectly natural and altogether real.