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42 ing for the comfort of his presence. And one night the child had crept close to him.

"Señor"

Frazer had wanted to sleep; he had answered nothing.

"Señor!" The boy's hand lingered this time in an earnest pressure upon his own.

"Yes?" he had said.

"It is only—may I stay always with you?"

It had seemed a simple thing to promise to keep him with him, and Frazer had gone to sleep in the very midst of the passionate little torrent of Mexican gratitude.

In the excitement of his early months in California the boy had seemed vastly a nuisance in transportation. Frazer had stayed only long enough in San Francisco to acquire an outfit and vocabulary, and hurried off to the southern mines. The boy rode closely by his side, indifferent to fatigue, his cheerfulness clouded by the fear that he might be overlooked and left behind.

Those months of feverish toil, and exaltation, and depression! As they lengthened into years, with the pot of gold still at the inaccessible end of the rainbow, and the blunt unloveliness of the frontier life rusting the vigor of his finer fiber, Frazer remembered his sense of restless resentment because the woman whom he loved and had left would not make any acknowledgment of his mistake or his failure. The impersonal tone of her early letters had been easier to bear than the silence she was beginning to make him endure. It seemed to him the tensity of his resolve to wrest the success of yellow gold through the clustering difficulties had only taken its firmest hold of him before the illness came that had hastened a revelation perhaps unfortunately delayed.

He remembered through the first hours before unconsciousness had come to him how glad he had been to feel that the boy was with him. They were living in the roughest of cliff cabins, alone, and he bad ordered him off to camp for a doctor. The boy had given him whisky, and then had stood in so irresolute a fright and suffering that Frazer had sworn him into action.

He knew now that he had lain four weeks near death; but when he opened his eyes upon that mellow October twilight, long ago, he was unconscious of anything but a pair of dimming Mexi-