ple of
candles, more home-like than any camp they had slept in thus far.
Mukoki's supper was a veritable feast--broiled caribou, cold beans that
the old Indian had cooked at their last camp, meal cakes and hot coffee.
The three happy hunters ate of it as though they had not tasted food for
a week.

The day, though a hard one, had been fraught with too much excitement
for them to retire to their blankets immediately after this meal, as
they had usually done in other camps. They realized, too, that they had
reached the end of their journey and that their hardest work was over.
There was no long jaunt ahead of them to-morrow. Their new life--the
happiest life in the world to them--had already begun. Their camp was
established, they were ready for their winter's sport, and from this
moment on they felt that their evenings were their own to do with as
they pleased.

So for many hours that night Rod, Mukoki and Wabigoon sat up and talked
and kept the fire roaring before the door. Twenty times they went over
the tragedy of the old cabin; twenty times they weighed the half-pound
of precious little lumps in the palms of their hands, and bit by bit
they built up that life romance of the days of long ago, when all this
wilderness was still an unopened book to the white man. And that story
seemed very clear to them now. These men had been prospectors. They had
discovered gold. Afterward they had quarreled, probably over some
division of it--perhaps over the ownership of the very nuggets they had
found; and then, in the heat of their anger, had followed the knife
battle.

But where had they discovered the gold? That was the question of supreme
interest to the hunters, and they debated it until midnight. There were
no mining tools in the camp; no pick, shovel or pan. Then it occurred to
them that the builders of the cabin had been hunters, had discovered
gold by accident and had collected that in the buckskin bag without the
use of a pan.

There was little sleep in the camp that night, and with the first light
of day the three were at work again. Immediately after breakfast the
task of tearing up the old and decayed floor began. One by one the split
saplings were pried up and carried out for firewood, until the earth
floor lay bare. Every foot of it was now eagerly turned over with a
shovel which had been brought in the equipment; the base-logs were
undermined, and filled in again; the moss that had been packed in the
chinks be