And so it was that eight years after Burr MacShane bid Camillo Bill good bye and headed North in the darkness, his name had been long forgotten, where once it had been the big name of all names. A dozen or more of the old timers would occasionally shake their heads in reminiscent regret that he had gone. Always they spoke of him in the past tense--all but Camillo Bill, who regularly deposited large sums in the bank to his credit. To the bank Burr MacShane was only a name--the name of its heaviest depositor. In answer to inquiry Camillo Bill had vouchsafed the information that Burr MacShane was his partner. That he was on a prospecting expedition somewhere in the North. And, that when he got ready he would return. And with the passing of the years MacShane’s dust piled up its interest. But, of all this, MacShane himself, knew nothing. Far to the northward, in that land of winter darkness where the Colville River winds its unmapped way to the frozen sea, Burr MacShane played a lone hand. There was something on the Colville--something big. Somewhere upon its upper reaches was a huge storehouse of gold--red gold. Gold that gripped him as no other gold had ever gripped him. It was like no other gold he had ever seen. Gold that stirred his imagination to its profoundest depths--wonderful--mysterious--red! Slowly and methodically he worked the bars of the lower river, panning the precious red particles from the muck. It did not run rich, a couple of dollars to the pan, hardly more. But what would it show deep down? There was no timber. He could not burn in. The second winter he laboriously hauled wood from the foothills of the Endicotts a hundred and fifty miles, pulling the sled with his dogs! Six round trips he made--and burned to bed rock in a week! So he worked up river, southward. One by one he explored the tributaries. For four years he worked--living like an Eskimo--delving like a gnome. Then he made a hurried trip to Coldfoot for supplies, and for another four years he buried himself in the North. During the long daylight of the short summers he explored the lower river, pan-washing the bars. And in the perpetual darkness of the long winters he would mush back to the foot hills and work the tributaries where some scraggy spruce timber furnished the necessary wood. And in the course of time he had learned a strange thing. The red gold of the lower river was top gold--new gold. It had not been washing long enough to have worked down even to the shallow bed rock. The gold of the upper river and its tributaries was old gold, paler, and deeper down. Therefore, he reasoned that somewhere between the two places he would one day find the source of the red gold. Some convulsion of nature--an earthquake, the fall of a cutbank, or an overhung spur of a mountain, had within a comparatively recent time, opened up this storehouse of red gold and the waters of the river were washing it down with the surface sand.