"We've beat them in! We've beat them in!" They had been walking rapidly since dawn, and, although Burrell's watch showed two o'clock, she refused to halt for lunch, declaring that the others might arrive at any moment; so down they went to the lower end of "No Creek" Lee's location, where Burrell blazed a smooth spot on the down-stream side of a tree and wrote thereon at Necia's dictation.

When he had finished, she signed her name, and he witnessed it, then paced off four hundred and forty steps, where he squared a spruce-tree, which she marked: "Lower centre end stake of No.

I below discovery.

Necia Gale, locator." She was vastly excited and immensely elated at her good-fortune in acquiring the claim next to Lee's, and chattered like a magpie, filling the glades with resounding echoes and dancing about in the bright sunlight that filtered through the branches.
"Now you stake the one below mine," she said.

"It's just as good, and maybe better--nobody can tell." But he shook his head.
"I'm not going to stake anything," said he.
"You must!" she cried, quickly, the sparkle dying from her eyes.