Ever since David went forth and slew Goliath with his sling, youth has set its puny lance to strike down giants; and history, making much of the hotspurs who won, draws a veil over the striplings who were slain. And yet all who know the stern conditions of life must recognize that youth is a handicap, and if David had but donned the heavy armor of King Saul he too would have gone to his death. But instead he stepped forth untrammeled by its weight, with nothing but a stone and a sling, and because the scoffing giant refused to raise his shield he was struck down by the pebble of a child. But giant Judson Eells was in a baby-killing mood when he invited Wunpost and Wilhelmina to his den; and when they emerged, after signing articles of incorporation, he licked his chops and smiled.

It developed at the meeting that the sole function of a stockholder is to vote for the Directors of the Company; and, having elected Eells and Lapham and John C. Calhoun Directors, the stockholders’ meeting adjourned. Reconvening immediately as a, Board of Directors, Judson Eells was elected President, John C. Calhoun, Vice-President and Phillip F. Lapham Secretary-treasurer after which an assessment of ten cents a share was levied upon all the stock. Exit John C. Calhoun and Wilhelmina Campbell, stripped of their stock and all faith in mankind. For even if by some miracle they should raise the necessary sum Judson Eells and Phillip Lapham would immediately vote a second assessment, and so on, ad finitum. Holding a majority of the stock, Eells could control the Board of Directors, and through it the policies of the company; and any assessments which he himself might pay would but be transferred from one pocket to the other. It was as neat a job of baby-killing as Eells had ever accomplished, and he slew them both with a smile.

They had conspired in their innocence to gain stock in the company and to hawk it about the streets; but neither had thought to suggest the customary Article: “The stock of said company shall be non-assessable.” The Articles of Incorporation had been drawn up by Phillip F. Lapham; and yet, after all his hard experiences, Wunpost was so awed by the legal procedure that he forgot all about the fine print. Not that it made any difference, they would have trimmed him anyway, but it was three times in the very same place! He cursed himself out loud for an ignorant baboon and left Wilhelmina in tears.

She had come down with her mother, her father being busy, and they had planned to take in the town; but after this final misfortune Wilhelmina lost all interest in the busy marts of trade. What to her were clothes and shoes when she had no money to buy them and when overdressed women, none too chaste in their demeanor, stared after her in boorish amusement? Blackwater had become a great city, but it was not for her the empty honor of having the Willie Meena named after her was all she had won from her mine. John C. Calhoun had been right when he warned her, long before, that the mining game was more like a dog fight than it was like a Sunday school picnic; and yet well, some people made money at it. Perhaps they were better at reading the fine print, and not so precipitate about signing Articles of Incorporation, but as far as she was concerned Wilhelmina made a vow never to trust a lawyer again.

She returned to the ranch, where the neglected garden soon showed signs of her changing mood; but after the weeds had been chopped out and routed she slipped back to her lookout on the hill. It was easier to tear the weeds from a tangled garden than old memories from her lonely heart; and she took up, against her will, the old watch for Wunpost, who had departed from Blackwater in a fury. He had stood on the corner and, oblivious of her presence, had poured out the vials of his wrath; he had cursed Eells for a swindler, and Lapham for his dog and Lynch for his yellow hound. He had challenged them all, either individually or collectively, to come forth and meet him in battle; and then he had offered to fight any man in Blackwater who would say a good word for any of them. But Blackwater looked on in cynical amusement, for Eells was the making of the town; and when he had given off the worst of his venom Wunpost had tied up his roll and departed.

He had left as he had come, a single-blanket tourist, packing his worldly possessions on his back; and when last seen by Wilhelmina he was headed east, up the wash that came down from the Panamints. Where he was going, when he would return, if he ever would return, all were mysteries to the girl who waited on; and if she watched for him it was because there was no one else whose coming would stir her heart. Far up the canyon and over the divide there lived Hungry Bill and his family, but Hungry was an Indian and when he dropped in it was always to get something to eat. He had two sons and two daughters, whom he kept enslaved, forbidding them to even think of marriage; and all his thoughts were of money and things to eat, for Hungry Bill was an Indian miser.

He came through often now with his burros packed with fruit from the abandoned white-man’s ranch that he had occupied; and even his wild-eyed daughters had more variety than Billy, for they accompanied him to Blackwater and Willie Meena. There they sold their grapes and peaches at exorbitant prices and came back with coffee and flour, but neither would say a word for fear of their old father, who watched them with intolerant eyes. They were evil, snaky eyes, for it was said that in his day he had waylaid many a venturesome prospector, and while they gleamed ingratiatingly when he was presented with food, at no time did they show good will. He was still a renegade at heart, shunned and avoided by his own kinsmen, the Shoshones who camped around Wild Rose; but it was from him, from this old tyrant that she despised so cordially, that Wilhelmina received her first news of Wunpost.

Hungry Bill came up grinning, on his way down from his ranch, and fixed her with his glittering black eyes.

“You savvy Wunpo?” he asked, “hi-ko man busca gol’? Him sendum piece of lock!”

He produced a piece of rock from a knot in his shirt-tail and handed it over to her slowly. It was a small chunk of polished quartz, half green, half turquoise blue; and in the center, like a jewel, a crystal of yellow gold gleamed out from its matrix of blue. Wilhelmina gazed at it blankly, then flushed and turned away as she felt Hungry Bill’s eyes upon her. He was a disreputable old wretch, who imputed to others the base motives which governed his own acts; and when she read his black heart Wilhelmina straightened up and gave him back the stone.

“No, you keepum!” protested Hungry. “Hi-ko ketchum plenty mo’.”

But Wilhelmina shook her head.

“No!” she said, “you give that to my mother. Are those your girls down there? Well, why don’t you let them come up to the house? You no good I don’t like bad Indians!”

She turned away from him, still frowning angrily, and strode on down to the creek; but the daughters of Hungry Bill, in their groveling way, seemed to share the low ideals of their father. They were tall and sturdy girls, clad in breezy calico dresses and with their hair down over their eyes; and as they gazed out from beneath their bangs a guilty smile contorted their lips, a smile that made Wilhelmina writhe.

“What’s the matter with you?” she snapped, and as the scared look came back she turned on her heel and left them. What could one expect, of course, from Hungry Bill’s daughters after they had been guarded like the slave-girls in a harem; but the joy of hearing from Wunpost was quite lost in the fierce anger which the conduct of his messengers evoked. He was up there, somewhere, and he had made another strike the most beautiful blue quartz in the world but these renegade Shoshones with their understanding smiles had quite killed the pleasure of it for her. She returned to the house where Hungry Bill, in the kitchen, was wolfing down a great pan of beans; but the sight of the old glutton with his mouth down to the plate quite sickened her and drove her away. Wunpost was up in the hills, and he had made a strike, but with that she must remain content until he either came down himself or chose a more highminded messenger.

Hungry Bill went on to Blackwater and came back with a load of supplies, which he claimed he was taking to “Wunpo”; and, after he had passed up the canyon, Wilhelmina strolled along behind him. At the mouth of Corkscrew Gorge there was a great pool of water, overshadowed by a rank growth of willows through whose tops the wild grapevines ran riot. Here it had been her custom, during the heat of the day, to paddle along the shallows or sit and enjoy the cool air. There was always a breeze at the mouth of Corkscrew Gorge, and when it drew down, as it did on this day, it carried the odors of dank caverns. In the dark and gloomy depths of this gash through the hills the rocks were always damp and cold; and beneath the great waterfalls, where the cloudbursts had scooped out pot-holes, there was a delicious mist and spray. She dawdled by the willows, then splashed on up the slippery trail until, above the last echoing waterfall, she stepped out into the world beyond.

The great canyon spread out again, once she had passed the waterworn Gorge, and peak after peak rose up to right and left where yawning side canyons led in. But all were set on edge and reared up to dizzying heights; and along their scarred flanks there lay huge slides of shaley rock, ready to slip at the touch of a hand. Vivid stripes of red and green, alternating with layers of blue and white, painted the sides of the striated ridges; and odd seams here and there showed dull yellows and chocolate browns like the edge of a crumbled layer-cake. Up the canyon the walls shut in again, and then they opened out, and so on for nine miles until Old Panamint was reached and the open valley sloped up to the summit.

Many a time in the old days when they had lived in Panamint had Wilhelmina scaled those far heights; the huge white wall of granite dotted with ball-like piñóns and junipers, which fenced them from Death Valley beyond. It opened up like a gulf, once the summit was reached, and below the jagged precipices stretched long ridges and fan-like washes which lost themselves at last in the Sink. For a hundred miles to the north and the south it lay, a writhing ribbon of white, pinching down to narrow strips, then broadening out in gleaming marshes; and on both sides the mountains rose up black and forbidding, a bulwark against the sky. Wilhelmina had never entered it, she had been content to look down; and then she crept back to beautiful sheltered Panamint where father had his mine.

It was up on the ridge, where the white granite of the summit came into contact with the burnt limestone and schist; and, of all the rich mines, the Homestake was the best, until the cloudburst came along and spoiled all of them. Wilhelmina still remembered how the great flood had passed the town, moving boulders as if they were pebbles; but not until it reached the place where she stood had it done irretrievable damage. The roadbed was washed out, but the streambed remained, and the banks from which to fill in more dirt; but when the flood struck the Gorge it backed up into a lake, for the narrow defile was choked. Trees and rocks and rumbling boulders had piled up against its entrance, holding the waters back like a dam; and when they broke through they sluiced everything before them, gouging the canyon down to the bedrock. Now twelve years had passed by and only a hazardous trail threaded the Gorge which had once been a highway.

Wilhelmina gazed up the valley and sighed again, for since that terrific cloudburst she had been stranded in Jail Canyon like a piece of driftwood tossed up by the flood. Nothing happened to her, any more than to the piñón logs which the waters had wedged high above the stream, and as she returned home down the Gorge she almost wished for another flood, to float them and herself away. No one came by there any more, the trail was so poor, and yet her father still clung to the mine; but a flood would either fill up the Gorge with debris or make even him give up hope. She sank down by the cool pool and put her feet in the water, dabbling them about like a wilful child; but at a shout from below she rose up a grown woman, for she knew it was Dusty Rhodes.

He came on up the creekbed with his burros on the trot, hurling clubs at the laggards as he ran; and when they stopped short at the sight of Wilhelmina he almost rushed them over her. But a burro is a creature of lively imagination, to whom the unknown is always terrible; and at a fresh outburst from Dusty the whole outfit took to the brush, leaving him face to face with his erstwhile partner.

“Oh, hello, hello!” he called out gruffly. “Say, did Hungry Bill go through here? He was jest down to Blackwater, buying some grub at the store, and he paid for it with rock that was half gold! So git out of the road, my little girl I’m going up to prospect them hills!”

“Don’t you call me your little girl!” called back Billy angrily. “And Hungry Bill hasn’t got any mine!”

“Oh, he ain’t, hey?” mocked Dusty, leaving his burros to browse while he strode triumphantly up to her. “Then jest look at that, my my fine young lady! I got it from the store-keeper myself!”

He handed her a piece of green and blue quartz, but she only glanced at it languidly. The memory of his perfidy on a previous occasion made her long to puncture his pride, and she passed the gold ore back to him.

“I’ve seen that before,” she said with a sniff, “so you can stop driving those burros so hard. It came from Wunpost’s mine.”

“Wunpost!” yelled Dusty Rhodes, his eyes getting big; and then he spat out an oath. “Who told ye?” he demanded, sticking his face into hers, and she stepped away disdainfully.

“Hungry Bill,” she said, and watched him writhe as the bitter truth went home. “You think you’re so smart,” she taunted at last, “why don’t you go out and find one for yourself? I suppose you want to rush in and claim a half interest in his strike and then sell out to old Eells. I hope he kills you, if you try to do it I would, if I were him. What’d you do with that five thousand dollars?”

“Eh eh that’s none of your business,” bleated Dusty Rhodes, whose trip to Los Angeles had proved disastrous. “And if Wunpost gave Hungry that sack of ore he stole it from some other feller’s mine. I knowed all along he’d locate that Black P’int if I ever let him stop I’ve had my eye on it for years and that’s why I hurried by. I discovered it myself, only I never told nobody he must have heard me talking in my sleep!”

“Yes, or when you were drunk!” suggested Wilhelmina maliciously. “I hear you got robbed in Los Angeles. And anyhow I’m glad, because you stole that five thousand dollars, and no good ever came from stolen property.”

“Oh, it didn’t, hey?” sneered Dusty, who was recovering his poise, “well, I’ll bet ye this rock was stolen! And if that’s the case, where does your young man git off, that you think the world and all of? But you’ve got to show me that he ever saw this rock I believe old Hungry was lying to you!”

“Well, don’t let me keep you!” cried Billy, bowing mockingly. “Go on over and ask him yourself but I’ll bet you don’t dare to meet Wunpost!”

“How come Hungry to tell you?” burst out Dusty Rhodes at last, and Wilhelmina smiled mysteriously.

“That’s none of your business, my busy little man,” she mimicked in patronizing tones, “but I’ve got a piece of that rock right up at the house. You go back there and mother will show it to you.”

“I’m going on!” answered Dusty with instant decision; “can’t stop to make no visit today. They’s a big rush coming every burro-man in Blackwater and some of them are legging it afoot. But that thieving son of a goat, he never found no mine! I know it it can’t be possible!”