y or that knowledge of human nature that had given him
his high place in former days, but he was possessed of a dream of
wealth so vast that ordinary fortunes shrank into insignificance in
comparison. He had fallen under the spell of an Indian tale of a lost
river of fabulous wealth in gold that disturbed all his sense of value.
In one of his prospecting tours he had come upon an old Indian hunter,
torn by a grizzly and dying. For weeks he nursed the old Indian in his
camp with tender but unavailing care. In gratitude, the dying man had
told of the lost river that flowed over rocks and sands sown with gold.
In his young days the Indian had seen the river and had gathered its
"yellow sand and stones"; in later years, however, when he had come to
know something of the value of this "yellow sand and stones" he had
sought the river, but in vain. A mountain peak in one vast slide had
filled up the valley, diverted the course of the river, and changed the
whole face of the country. For many summers the Indian had sought with
the unfaltering patience of his race the bed of the lost river, and at
length, that very summer, he had discovered it. Deep down in a side
canyon in the bed of a trickling brook he had found "yellow sand and
stones" similar to those of the lost river of his youth. As the dying
Indian poured out from his buckskin bag the glittering sand and rusty
bits of rock, there entered into the Old Prospector the terrible
gold-lust that for thirteen years burned as a fever in his bones and
lured him on through perils and privations, over mountains and along
canyons, making him insensible to storms and frosts and burning suns,
and that even now, old man as he was, worn and broken, still burned
with unquenchable flame.

Under the spell of that dream of wealth he found it easy to pay his
"debts of honour" to Carroll with mining claims, which, however
valuable in themselves, were to him paltry in comparison with the
wealth of the Lost River, to which every year brought him nearer, and
which one day he was sure he would possess. That Carroll and his
confederate robbed him he knew well enough, but finding Carroll useful
to him, both in the way of outfitting his annual expeditions and in
providing means for the gratifying of his life-long gambling passion,
by which the deadly monotony of the long winter days and nights was
relieved, he tolerated while he scorned him and his villainy.

Not so Perault, whose devotion to his "