They worked feverishly, the threat of the winter rains urging them on. The girl helped, leaving her kettle settled firm on a bed of embers while the water heated for dish washing, to join them on the shore, heaped with their earth piles. She kept the rocker in motion while the old man dipped up the water in a tin ladle and sent it running over the sifting bed of sand and pebbles. The heavier labor of digging was Courant's. Before September was over the shore was honeycombed with his excavations, driven down to the rock bed. The diminishing stream shrunk with each day and he stood in it knee high, the sun beating on his head, his clothes pasted to his skin by perspiration, and the thud of his pick falling with regular stroke on the monotonous rattle of the rocker.

Sometimes she was tired and they ordered her to leave them and rest in the shade of the camp. She loitered about under the spread of the pine boughs, cleaning and tidying up, and patching the ragged remnants of their clothes. Often, as she sat propped against the trunk, her sewing fell to her lap and she looked out with shining, spell-bound eyes. The men were shapes of dark importance against the glancing veil of water, the soaked sands and the low brushwood yellowing in the autumn's soft, transforming breath. Far away the film of whitened summits dreamed against the blue. In the midwash of air, aloft and dreaming, too, the hawk's winged form poised, its shadow moving below it across the sea of tree tops.

She would sit thus, motionless and idle, as the long afternoon wore away, and deep-colored veils of twilight gathered in the canon. She told the men the continuous sounds of their toil made her drowsy. But her stillness was the outward sign of an inner concentration. If delight in rest had replaced her old bodily energy, her mind had gained a new activity. She wondered a little at it, not yet at the heart of her own mystery. Her thoughts reached forward into the future, busied themselves with details of the next twelve months, dwelt anxiously on questions of finance. The nest-building instinct was astir in her and she pondered on the house they were to build, how they must arrange something for a table, and maybe fashion armchairs of barrels and red flannel. Finally, in a last voluptuous flight of ecstasy, she saw herself riding into Sacramento with a sack of dust and abandoning herself to an orgie of bartering.

One afternoon three men, two Mexicans and an Australian sailor from a ship in San Francisco cove, stopped at the camp for food. The Australian was a loquacious fellow, with faculties sharpened by glimpses of life in many ports. He told them of the two emigrant convoys he had just seen arrive in Sacramento, worn and wasted by the last forced marches over the mountains. Susan, who had been busy over her cooking, according him scant attention, at his description of the trains, suddenly lifted intent eyes and leaned toward him:

"Did you see a man among them, a young man, tall and thin, with black hair and beard?"

"All the men were tall and thin, or any ways thin," said the sailor, laughing. "How tall was he?"

"Six feet," she replied, her face devoid of any answering smile, "with high shoulders and walking with a stoop. He had a fine, handsome face, and long black hair to his shoulders and gray eyes."