“No. He wus terrible secret about it. Terrible afraid somebody’d rob him. Kind o’ sick you know about it.” Slowly Blumpitty tapped his yellow-gray forehead. “But he allowed he’d found something worth while an’ he never let his bundle o’ dust out o’ sight. Day an’ night he kep’ it jest under his hand. Everybody nosin’ around, tryin’ to be friends with him. One day I wus passin’, an’ his dawg went fur me. I picked up a stone. ‘Don’t y’ do it,’ he calls out o’ the sod cabin, where he wus layin’ with the door open. ‘Don’t y’ do nothin’ to that dawg,’ he says. I explained the dawg wus doin’ things to me. ‘Come in here,’ he said, ‘an’ she won’t touch you.’ So I did, an’ we talked a while.” “Well?” “He asked me kind o’ sarcastic, was I ‘lookin’ fur the Mother Lode?’ I said I guessed I wusn’t no different from other men, except that I wusn’t hangin’ round a sick man fur to get his secrets out o’ him. ‘No,’ he said, ‘I ain’t never seen you hangin’ round.’ An’ then he told me.” “What?” “I says, ‘I’m figurin’ on findin’ the Mother Lode up in them hills yonder.’ ‘That’s right,’ he said, an’ his eyes wus kind o’ wild an’ glassy. ‘Up over yonder?’ I said. ‘Yes,’ says he; ‘up North. That’s where the Mother Lode is.’ An’ I think from what he said, he’d called his discovery-claim ‘The Lode Star.’” “What made you think—” “Course he wus kind o’ queer—out of his head, y’ know, fur he called it the ‘Mother Lode Star.’ An’ he wus terrible secret about it. All the time gettin’ away from the subject and talkin’ about the dawg.” “Well—” “Wa-al, they wusn’t more’n half a dozen people at Polaris then, an’ nobody’d found anything to make a boom out of. But they all hung on. And they made presents to that feller, took him grub regillar. An’ other folks kep’ comin’ jest becuz that man wus there. An’ they all knoo he’d struck it rich. An’ they all knoo he wus dyin’. That was what they wus waitin’ for. I didn’t wait, even them few days they said he had to live. The snow wus beginning t’ fly an’ I had to go back to Glaysher and get Mrs. Blumpitty an’ our party out before navigation closed. But I said to myself, ‘I’ll risk it—fur the Mother Lode!’ An’ I did. Went up over the hills to the north, in a bee line from that cabin o’ his till I come ter—” Blumpitty’s voice dropped still lower and he hesitated, while, like one who scarce dares move lest he break some spell, slowly he looked round, and seemed to forget how to turn back. He remained so, sitting awry, listening. “It’s only some one moving about in Mr. Dorn’s room overhead. You found the Mother Lode?” He found he was able to twist himself back by dint of drawing out his watch. “When I get t’ thinkin’ about it I clean forget the time.” He stood up. “I guess I got t’ be goin’.” Footsteps and low subdued voices in the hall. Hildegarde had seen her brother from an upper window, and had come down with Mrs. Blumpitty to let Harry in. There would be no trouble in selling “Berth 21” for the third time.