But the trail was growing steeper, narrower every moment, and after a time Leloo forgot to reply to his forest friends, and just rode on, peering through the shadows to avoid the dangers on all sides. Presently a sound that belonged to neither crag nor canyon fell across his quick, Indian ears. It was a man's voice, hushed, subdued, speaking very low, and speaking in English. It said: "I hear a horse coming." "Shut up! Don't talk so loud," replied another voice. "I tell you I hear horses," answered the first voice irritably. "It must be the stage coming. Get ready!" "You're clean crazy," said the other voice. "The stage makes more noise than that, and I know for sure there's no horseman up the trail to-night. It's some wild animal you hear." Leloo pulled his cayuse stock still. He did not understand English readily, he was not versed in the ways of the white man, but his wonderful native wit and instinct told him at once that there was something wrong--the wrong things that white men were sent to jail for sometimes. He asked himself, "Why should they hide and whisper?" Only hunters hid and refused to speak aloud. Then he remembered--the stage. How often his father had talked of the great lumps of gold the white men were digging up, two hundred miles north, up the Frozen River--"Cariboo gold," his father had called it, and said that it was sent down in numberless bags to "the front," and the stage brought it. And his father would always finish the tale with, "The white men will risk their lives and kill each other for this gold." Leloo could never understand it, for he would much rather have a soft wolf skin to lie on, a string of blue Hudson's Bay beads around his dark throat, and fine, beaded moccasins, than all the gold in the world. But while he sat stock still, the voices continued: "There, it's stopped. I knew it was an animal. The stage won't be along for an hour yet." "They are white men, but the gold does not belong to them," Leloo told himself. "It belongs to the white men on the stage, or up in the Barkerville gold ledges. These white men here are 'bad medicine.' They shall not find that stage." But even as he thought it out, the voices began afresh. "There's something wrong with my gun," said one, "it won't work." "There's nothing wrong with _mine_," came the sneering reply. "_Mine_ will work all right. I'm going to have that gold." "How much did Jim Orton say there was a-coming down on the stage?" whispered the other. "Some twenty thousand dollars' worth of nuggets," was the answer. "And you'll use your gun, too, to get it, if you don't turn coward."