ruins again, this time plunging hurriedly through, and kicking
aside the charred heaps without a thought of what they had
contained. Key was not an unfeeling man, he was not an unrefined
one: he was a gentleman by instinct, and had an intuitive sympathy
for others; but in that instant his whole mind was concentrated
upon the calcined outcrop! And his first impulse was to see if it
bore any evidence of previous examination, prospecting, or working
by its suddenly evicted neighbors and owners. There was none: they
had evidently not known it. Nor was there any reason to suppose
that they would ever return to their hidden home, now devastated
and laid bare to the open sunlight and open trail. They were
already far away; their guilty personal secret would keep them from
revisiting it. An immense feeling of relief came over the soul of
this moral romancer; a momentary recognition of the Most High in
this perfect poetical retribution. He ran back quickly to his
saddle-bags, drew out one or two carefully written, formal notices
of preemption and claim, which he and his former companions had
carried in their brief partnership, erased their signatures and
left only his own name, with another grateful sense of Divine
interference, as he thought of them speeding far away in the
distance, and returned to the ruins. With unconscious irony, he
selected a charred post from the embers, stuck it in the ground a
few feet from the debris of outcrop, and finally affixed his
"Notice." Then, with a conscientiousness born possibly of his new
religious convictions, he dislodged with his pickaxe enough of the
brittle outcrop to constitute that presumption of "actual work"
upon the claim which was legally required for its maintenance, and
returned to his horse. In replacing his things in his saddle-bags
he came upon the slipper, and for an instant so complete was his
preoccupation in his later discovery, that he was about to throw it