“What is it?” laughed Cheviot. “You look as if you couldn’t make up your mind to trust me.” “No, I’m making up my mind I will.” Again he paused for a moment, and then, “I am too old to do the thing alone,” he said. “Well, I can manage the boat, anyhow.” “Oh, the girl can row as well as a man, but I must have a partner.” And sitting there in the deserted cabin Nathaniel Mar, for the last time, told how a hundred and odd miles further up the coast he had panned out gold with a dead man’s help when he himself was young. And when he had said it, that thing befell him that overtook any enthusiast in talking to Louis Cheviot. Mar saw his story on a sudden in a comic light. Clear now, its relationship to twenty “tall stories,” fit matter for a twitch of the humorous lip, a hitch of the judicial shoulder. The unconscious Cheviot had choked off many a confidence just by that look of cool amusement. “I’ve always said,” Mar wound up, preparing hastily to withdraw again into his shell, “I’ve always said it would ‘keep,’ and it _has_ kept close on thirty years.” “Well, it won’t keep much longer,” said Cheviot briskly. “Why not?” A tremor shot through the man with the secret. “Why? Because it’s in the air.” Mar clasped and unclasped his big walking-stick as if about to rise. “Before another year,” Cheviot went on, “the whole of Alaska will swarm with prospectors.” “Do you think so?” “Sure. Why, it’s begun. I don’t believe there’s a single Yukon tributary where there isn’t a man wandering about this minute with a shovel and a pan.” “The Yukon! Well, that’s a good way to the south!” “Those men that stopped at the mission last night—they were miners.” “They—they were after galena!” said Mar, almost angrily. “They knew that fairly good ore had been brought down Fish River off and on since ’81.” Cheviot laughed. “Well, if you imagine they won’t so much as look for gold, let’s smuggle your witch to St. Michaels and take the first steamer home. _I’ve_ had enough of the North.” “You say that because you don’t really believe I’ve discovered a second Klondike.” “Why shouldn’t I believe it? And haven’t I turned my back on the Klondike we all know exists?” “Those men that came to the mission yesterday,” Mar said hurriedly, “they—they were going to Fish River, weren’t they? Not—not up the coast?” “No, no, that’s all right,” Cheviot reassured him. “All I meant was that somebody hereabouts had only to whisper ‘Gold!’ for this whole country to swarm.” “I know—I know. But we’ll have the start, Cheviot.”