A year later a prospector was slowly pushing his way through the wilderness some seventy miles northward of St. Marys. It was springtime and the air was mild, but, while the ridges were already bare, great banks of snow still lay in the deep folds of the hills where the sun but touched them at noon hour. The endless lacework of naked branches now began to be feathered with tender green, and everywhere the bush was alive with the voices of wild things whose blood was stirred to mating by the soft caresses of the southerly wind. Thrusting through a patch of tangled undergrowth, the man reached higher ground and, advancing to a hillock, stood with his hat off and his brown face steaming with sweat. He was of middle age, with short, sturdy frame, a broad face of pale, copper color, swarthy black brows and a small, stringy mustache. His feet were enclosed in shoepacks, soggy with water, and he was otherwise clad in the nondescript fashion of old bushmen. Around his shoulders were strung a compass, binoculars and map case, and at his belt dangled a small ax and a prospector's hammer pick. He was torn, scratched, and in a general way disheveled, but the clear glance of the black eyes and the easy grace of his pose proclaimed him fit for action. He stood for some time while his keen glance searched the country ahead--a frozen sea in which congealed billows of rock thrust up their tumbled heads in a gigantic confusion. Here and there were more definite ridges that took a general trend, but for the most part it was a chaos of rock and timber, slope and swamp, the refuse from the construction of a more attractive country which had been assembled elsewhere. Presently Fisette took out his compass, balanced it in the palm of his sinewy hand and glanced at the needle. As he glanced, this filament of soft iron began to tremble and swing. He stood fascinated. Slowly at first, but gradually with more active and jerky motions, the thing became possessed. It vibrated as though in doubt, then moved off in continued restlessness. Not by any means could Fisette end these vagaries. After a little, a slow light grew in his eyes, his strong face broadened into a smile and, snapping back the compass lid, he strode down hill. A quarter of an hour later he was chipping the edges of a ridge of blackish-gray rock from which he had stripped great rolls of damp, green moss. The rock lay exposed and glistening, its polished surface scarred with the scratches of hard stones that once lay embedded in the feet of prehistoric glaciers, but Fisette, screwing his bushy brows over a tiny magnifying glass and peering at the sparkling fragments in his palm and balancing their weight, cared nothing for glaciers. He only knew he had found that which he had been seeking for more than a year.