THE PARTNERS ACQUIRE A FORTDuring the remainder of the short summer, and all through the fall, the two partners panned the gravel of innumerable creeks and rivers. Somewhere, far to the northward the Indians had said, lay the river of gold. So slowly they worked northward, panning as they went. When winter’s warning blasts chilled the air, they holed up in a shelter, half dugout, half poles, that they built on the south slope of a mountain. When the streams froze, they hunted, storing their meat on a platform well out of reach of prowling wolves and carcajous.
When spring came, they moved on. The second summer was a repetition of the first, and that winter was spent in the camp of a band of Indians on the shore of a long, narrow lake.
During all the third summer they moved slowly northwa
