The Mascot of Sweet Briar Gulch

The gulch ran in a trough of beauty to the foot of Jones’s Hill, which rose in a sweeping curve into the clouds. Wild flowers, trees in profuse leaf, and mats of vines covered the scarred earth, and the sky was as limpid as spring water; the air carried a weight of heart-stirring odors, yet Jim Felton, sitting on the door-step of his cabin in the brilliant sunshine, was not a happy man. He looked at the hollow of the gulch and cursed it manfully and bitterly. The gold should be there—Jim had figured it all out. The old wash cut at right angles to the creek, and at the turn was where its freight of yellow metal should have been deposited, but when you got down to the bed-rock, the blasted stuff was either slanted so nothing could stay on it, or was rotten—crumbling in your fingers, and that kind of bed will hold nothing.