action.

"Get movin', Billy! We can get down to Eden to-night; we'll have the
moon fur two hours on the trail soon's the sun's gone. I can get 'em to
drive me over to Skiplap first thing to-morrow, and I can have 'em make
me up a train there fur Montana City. Was he--"

"Dan'l J. has been took home--the noozepaper says."

They turned back down the trail, the old man astride Billy Brue's
horse, followed by his pack-mule and preceded by Billy.

Already, such was his buoyance and habit of quick recovery and
readjustment under reverses, his thoughts were turning to his grandson.
Daniel's boy--there was the grandson of his grandfather--the son of his
father--fresh from college, and the instructions of European travel,
knowing many things his father had not known, ready to take up the work
of his father, and capable, perhaps, of giving it a better finish. His
beloved West had lost one of its valued builders, but another should
take his place. His boy should come to him and finish the tasks of his
father; and, in the years to come, make other mighty tasks of
empire-building for himself and the children of his children.

It did not occur to him that he and the boy might be as far apart in
sympathies and aims as at that moment they were in circumstance. For,
while the old man in the garb of a penniless prospector, toiled down
the steep mountain trail on a cheap horse, his grandson was reading the
first news of his father's death in one of the luxurious staterooms of
a large steam yacht that had just let down her anchor in Newport
Harbour. And each--but for the death--had been where most he wished to