"
He studied the face of the cliff for a minute. The ledge jutted out from
the towering wall approximately twenty feet above our heads, but it
could be reached by a series of jagged points and knobs; a sort of
natural stairway--though some of the steps were a long way apart.
Boulders of all shapes and sizes lay bedded in the soft earth where we
stood.
"You shin up there, Sarge," Mac commanded, "and locate that mark. It
ought to be an easy climb."
I "shinned," and reached the ledge with a good deal of skin peeled from
various parts of my person. The first object my eye fell upon as I
hoisted myself above the four-foot shelf was a dull, yellow spot on the
gray rock, near enough so that I could lean forward and touch it with my
fingers. A two-inch circle of the real thing--I'd seen enough gold in
the raw to know it without any acid test--hammered into the coarse
sandstone. I pried it up with the blade of my knife and looked it over.
Originally it had been a fair-sized nugget. Hans or Rowan had pounded it
into place with the back of a hatchet (the corner-marks told me that),
flattening it to several times its natural diameter. I threw it down to
MacRae, and looked carefully along the ledge. There was no other mark
that I could see; I began to wonder if we were as hot on the scent as we
had thought.
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