stamp on 'im to show that he's passed Tom Bent's ordeal, an' is good fur
the best the world has to offer. Now, William, you're one o' us."

He smiled so engagingly that Will was compelled to laugh, and he felt,
too, that he had a new and powerful friend.

"That's right, laugh," said Giant Tom. "You take it the way a feller
orter, an' you an' me are goin' to be mighty good pards. An' that bein'
settled I want to know from you, Jim Boyd, what are you doin' in my
valley."

"Your valley, Giant! Why, you never saw it before," said the hunter.

"What's that got to do with it? I wuz comin' here an' any place that I'm
goin' to come to out here in the wilderness is mine, o' course."

"Coming here, I suppose, to hunt for gold! And you've been hunting for
it for fifteen years, you've trod along thousands and thousands of miles
and never found a speck of it yet."

The little man laughed joyously.

"That's true," he said. "I've worked years an' years an' I never yet had
a particle o' luck. But a dry spell, no matter how long, is always broke
some time or other by a rain, an' when my luck does come, it's goin' to
bust all over my face. Gold will just rain on me. I'll stand in it
knee-deep an' then shoulder deep, an' then right up to my mouth."

"You haven't changed a bit," said Boyd, grinning also. "You're the same
Giant Tom, a real giant in strength and courage, that I've met off and
on through the years. It's been a long time since I first saw you."

"It was in Californy in '49. I was only fourteen then, but I went out
with my uncle in the first rush. Seventeen years I've hunted the yellow
stuff, in the streams, in the mountains, all up an' down the coast, in
the British territories, an' way back in the Rockies, but I've yet to
see its color. Uncle Pete found some, and when he died he left what
money he had to me. 'Jest you take it an' keep on huntin', Tom, my boy,'
he said. 'Now an' then I think I've seen traces o' impatience in you.
When you'd been lookin' only six or seven years, an' found nothin', I
heard you speak in a tone of disapp'intment, once. Don't you do it
ag'in. That ain't the way things are won. It takes sperrit an' patience
to be victor'us. Hang on to the job you've set fur yourse'f, an' thirty
or forty years from now you'll be shore to reap a full reward, though it
might come sooner.' An' here I am, fresh, strong, only a little past
thirty, and I kin afford to hunt an' wait for my pay 'bout thirty years