There the loads lay, in among the
bones--painted canvas sacks, and inside moosehide sacks, and inside the
moosehide sacks--what do you think?'"

She stopped, reached under a corner of the bed among the spruce boughs,
and pulled out a leather sack. She untied the mouth and ran out into my
hand as pretty a stream of gold as I have ever seen--coarse gold, placer
gold, some large dust, but mostly nuggets, and it was so fresh and rough
that it scarcely showed signs of water-wash.

"'You say you're a mining engineer,' she said, 'and you know this
country. Can you name a pay-creek that has the color of that gold!'

"I couldn't! There wasn't a trace of silver. It was almost pure, and I
told her so.

"'You bet,' she said. 'I sell that for nineteen dollars an ounce. You
can't get over seventeen for Eldorado gold, and Minook gold don't fetch
quite eighteen. Well, that was what I found among the bones--eight
horse-loads of it, one hundred and fifty pounds to the load.'

"'A quarter of a million dollars!' I cried out.

"'That's what I reckoned it roughly,' she answered. 'Talk about Romance!
And me a slaving the way I had all the years, when as soon as I ventured
out, inside three days, this was what happened. And what became of the
men that mined all that gold? Often and often I wonder about it. They
left their horses, loaded and tied, and just disappeared off the face of
the earth, leaving neither hide nor hair behind them. I never heard tell
of them. Nobody knows anything about them. Well, being the night-born, I
reckon I was their rightful heir.'"

Trefethan stopped to light a cigar.

"Do you know what that girl did? She cached the gold, saving out thirty
pounds, which she carried back to the coast. Then she signaled a passing
canoe, made her way to Pat Healy's trading post at Dyea, outfitted,
and went over Chilcoot Pass. That was in '88--eight years before the
Klondike strike, and the Yukon was a howling wilderness. She was afraid
of the bucks, but she took two young squaws with her, crossed the lakes,
and went down the river and to all the early camps on the Lower Yukon.
She wandered several years over that country and then on in to where I
met her. Liked the looks of it, she said, seeing, in her own words, 'a
big bull caribou knee-deep in purple iris on the valley-bottom.' She
hooked up with the Indians, doctored them, gained their confidence, and
gradually took them in charge. She had only left that country once, and