nd tear the
crackling logs apart, but thought better of it. Swinging his eyes along
the valley rim that stood out black against the aurora, he lifted his
long arms. "It's mine, all mine! Understand?" He cried the words loudly,
wildly, as if challenging the silence. "It's no good to me, but it's
mine, and, by God, I'll keep it!"

McGill reached bed-rock the next evening and spent most of the night
panning the pile of scrapings he had collected from the bottom of the
pit. If the top of the streak had been rich, the lower concentration was
amazing. Every seam in the shattered limestone, which stood on end like
sluice riffles, contained little flattened pumpkin-seeds of gold; they
lay embedded in the clay stringers like plums in a pudding or as if some
lavish hand had inserted them there, as coins are slipped into the slot
of a child's savings-bank. He could see them before the dirt was half
washed, but took a supreme pleasure, nevertheless, in watching the
yellow pile grow as the sediment disappeared. A baking-powder can was
half filled when he had finished; it told him unmistakably the magnitude
of his riches. He was a wealthy man, wealthier than he had ever dreamed
of being there was more where this came from and the gulch lay
unappropriated from end to end. Fortune had come in a day, and he would
never want so long as he lived. His thoughts were wild and chaotic, for
he was half mad from the silence.

But what use to make of his discovery he hardly knew, since he had slunk
away from the world, ablaze with hatred for his fellow-men, intending to
live alone for the rest of his days. His grudge was as bitter now as
then, and he determined, therefore, to keep his find a secret. That
would be a grim, if unsatisfactory, sort of revenge, he reflected. He
would take what he wished, and let other men wear out their lives
searching unsuccessfully. Those strangers to the westward, for instance,
would toil and suffer through the long winter, then leave discouraged.
There was money here for them and for hundreds--thousands--like them,
but he decided to guard his secret and to let it die with him.

McGill pictured the result of this news if he gave it out; the stampede,
the headlong rush that would bring men from every corner of the North.
He saw this silent valley bared of its brooding forest and filled with
people; he saw a log city in the flats down by the river; he heard the
bass blasts of steamboats, the shrilling of saw-mills