" growled Tregelly; "he has seen it. Meant to
have covered it before he woke."

"No, no; he is not pointing there."

"Look! Look!" cried Abel.

"Poor lad, he's off his head," whispered Tregelly.

"Do you hear me, you two?" cried Abel hoarsely. "Look! Can't you see?"

"What is it, Bel?" said Dallas soothingly, as he stepped round to the
other side of the fire; and then, following the direction of his
cousin's pointing finger, he too uttered a wild cry, which brought
Tregelly to their side, to gaze in speechless astonishment at the sight
before them.

For the thick glazing of ice had been melted from the perpendicular wall
of rock at the back of their fire, and there, glistening and sparkling
in the face of the cliff, were veins, nuggets, and time-worn fragments
of rich red gold in such profusion, that, far up as they could see, the
cliff seemed to be one mass of gold-bearing rock, richer than their
wildest imagination had ever painted.

The effect upon the adventurers was as strange as it was marked.

Abel bowed down his face in his hands to hide its spasmodic
contractions; while Dallas rose, stepped slowly towards it, and reached
over the glowing flame to touch a projecting nugget--bright, glowing in
hue, and quite warm from the reflection of the fire.

"Ah!" he sighed softly, as if convinced at last; "it is real, and not a
dream."

Tregelly turned his back, began to whistle softly an old tune in a minor
key, and drew the coffee, the bacon pan, and the bread a little farther
away.

"Ahoy there, my sons!" he cried cheerily; "breakfast! Fellows must eat
even if they are millionaires."

It was too much for Dallas, before whose eyes was rising, not the gold,
for he seemed to be looking right through that, but the wistful,
deeply-lined face of a grey-haired woman at a window, watching ever for
the lost ones' return.

At Tregelly's words he burst into a strangely harsh, hysterical laugh,
and then, too, he sank upon his knees and buried his face in his hands,
remaining there motionless till a hand was laid upon his shoulder, and
he started to find it was Abel who was gazing in his eyes.

"Dal," he cried, in a voice that did not sound like his own, "we shall
pay the old uncle now."

At that moment the dismal tune Tregelly was whistling came to an end,
and they saw that he was sitting with his back to them, looking straight
away.

They stepped quickly to his side, and he started up to hold a hand to
ea