prevent his escape. In vague and helpless desperation he gasped--
"What place is this?"
"Folks call it Deadman's Gulch."
Deadman's Gulch! A flash of intelligence lit up the boy's blind
confusion. Deadman's Gulch! Could it have been Jim Hooker who had really
run away, and had taken his name? He turned half-imploringly to the
first speaker.
"Wasn't he older than me, and bigger? Didn't he have a smooth, round
face and little eyes? Didn't he talk hoarse? Didn't he--" He stopped
hopelessly.
"Yes; oh, he wasn't a bit like you," said the man musingly. "Ye see,
that's the h-ll of it! You're altogether TOO MANY and TOO VARIOUS fur
this camp."
"I don't know who's been here before, or what they have said," said
Clarence desperately, yet even in that desperation retaining the dogged
loyalty to his old playmate, which was part of his nature. "I don't
know, and I don't care--there! I'm Clarence Brant of Kentucky; I started
in Silsbee's train from St. Jo, and I'm going to the mines, and you
can't stop me!"
The man who had first spoken started, looked keenly at Clarence, and
then turned to the others. The gentleman known as the living skeleton
had obtruded his huge bulk in front of the boy, and, gazing at him, said
reflectively, "Darned if it don't look like one of Brant's pups--sure!"
"Air ye any relation to Kernel Hamilton Brant of Looeyville?" asked the
first speaker.
Again that old question! Poor Clarence hesitated, despairingly. Was
he to go through the same cross-examination he had undergone with the
Peytons? "Yes," he said doggedly, "I am--but he's dead, and you know
it."
"Dead--of course." "Sartin." "He's dead." "The Kernel's planted," said
the men in chorus.
"Well, yes," reflected the Living Skeleton ostentatiously, as one who
spoke from experience. "Ham Brant's about as bony now as they make 'em."
"You bet! About the dustiest, deadest corpse you kin turn out,"
corroborated Slumgullion Dick, nodding his head gloomily to the others;
"in point o' fack, es a corpse, about the last one I should keer to go
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