and over, weighing it. One place in the stained, brassy-looking thing had been scratched, and every time the light caught that new abrasion, it glinted. The white man took out his knife and cut the substance. It was gold!” “_Weal_ gold?” said Jack Galbraith, gathering up his sprawled-out body with a squirrel-like quickness. “Real gold,” answered Mar. “‘Any more stuff like this about?’ the white man asked. The native looked at the nugget, and shrugged indifferently. The white man dug about in the gravel with his hands and a sharp stone, and then he sat down and thought, with his eyes on the place where the nugget had been. The Esquimau boy got out his bird-dart, and went off a little way after a jack-snipe. The white man knew he ought to make a miner’s assay.” “What’s vat?” “That’s ‘panning.’ If he’d had a round pan like Sigma’s bread pan, he’d have put some sand and gravel in it, and he would fill it to the brim with water, and he’d wash the sand and gravel round and round, picking out all the stones and letting off the water little by little, with a circular motion—so. And all the lighter sand and stuff would get washed out; and by and by, if the miner knows his business, any gold that may have been in that sand, every particle, is left behind in the bottom of the pan.” “Gwacious! Vat _would_ be luck!” said Jack, with enthusiasm. “No, it isn’t luck. It’s skill and specific gravity.” “Why didn’t ve man twy it?” “He hadn’t any pan. He hadn’t even a shovel. I’ve seen it done very cleverly with a shovel. I’ve seen it done with a saucer. He had nothing. How was he going to find out if there was any more of that stuff there? Had this one nugget by any chance been dropped? No, that was absurd. Who could have dropped it? But he looked up the bank where the bones shone, and out of the coarse grass a skull grinned at him. Not a wolf’s skull, or a deer’s, as he’d thought. A human being’s—a white man’s, perhaps. Had the nugget belonged to him? Had he brought it from some valley far away, and lost his bit of gold as well as his life here under the shadow of the great stone anvil? The graver the man got down there by the water, the broader the one on the bank seemed to grin. Suddenly the living man got up, and ran toward that heap of bones as if he couldn’t rest till he’d found out what the joke was the dead man was laughing at. He picked up the skull, and he saw it was a white man’s.” “How could he see vat?”