"Well," I began, when I had negotiated that precarious succession of
knobs and notches and accumulated a fresh set of bruises, "why don't you
get busy? How much wiser are you now? Where's your gold-dust?"

He took a deliberate puff and squinted up at the ledge again. "I'm
sitting on it, as near as I can figure," he coolly asserted.

"Yes, you are," I fleered. "I'm from Missouri!"

"Oh, you're a doubting Thomas of the first water," he said. "Stand
behind me, you confounded unbeliever. Kink your back a little and look
over that stone you set for a mark. Do you see anything that catches
your attention?"

Getting in the position he suggested, I looked up. Away back in the days
before the white man was a power to be reckoned with in the Indian's
scheme of things, some warrior had stood upon that self-same ledge and
hacked out with a flint chisel what he and his fellows doubtless
considered a work of art. Uncanny-looking animals, and uncannier figures
that might have passed for anything from an articulated skeleton to a
Missing Link, cavorted in a long line across that tribal
picture-gallery. Between each group of figures the face of the rock was
scored with mysterious signs and rudely limned weapons of war and chase.
Right over the stone marker, a long-shafted war-lance was carved--the
blade pointing down. MacRae's seat, stone-marker, and aboriginal
spearhead; the three lined up like the sights of a modern rifle. The
conclusion, in the light of what we knew from Rutter, was obvious, even
to a lunkhead like myself.

"It looks like you might have struck it," I was constrained to admit.