"I reckon you've been foolin' away in Sacramento the money yer parents give yer for return stage fare, eh?
Don't lie, sonny," he added grimly, as the now artful Clarence smiled diplomatically, "I've been thar myself!" Luckily, the excuse that he was "tired and sleepy" prevented further dangerous questioning, and the boy was soon really in deep slumber on the wagon floor.
He awoke betimes to find himself already in the mountains.

Buckeye Mills was a straggling settlement, and Clarence prudently stopped any embarrassing inquiry from his friend by dropping off the wagon with his equipment as they entered it, and hurriedly saying "Good-by" from a crossroad through the woods.

He had learned that the nearest mining camp was five miles away, and its direction was indicated by a long wooden "flume," or water-way, that alternately appeared and disappeared on the flank of the mountain opposite.

The cooler and drier air, the grateful shadow of pine and bay, and the spicy balsamic odors that everywhere greeted him, thrilled and exhilarated him.

The trail plunging sometimes into an undisturbed forest, he started the birds before him like a flight of arrows through its dim recesses; at times he hung breathlessly over the blue depths of canyons where the same forests were repeated a thousand feet below.