“Mayhap. But we are not so aimless as you may think. We go to Fifty Mile and to Dumont’s Camp and stay. Sooner or later Shanty Moir will come there, to throw my father’s gold over the bars and to worse. It may be a month, a year—it doesn’t make any difference. But I suppose a great man like you has a quicker and surer way of doing it?” “I have,” said Reivers. “No doubt. I could see your eyes grow greedy when you heard my uncle tell of gold.” “Oh, no; not especially,” taunted Reivers. “The gold is an incident. Shanty Moir is what interests me. He seems to be a gentleman of parts. I’m going to get him. I’m going to bring you face to face with him. I want to see if you could make good the strong talk you’ve been dealing out as to what you would do. You interest me that way, Miss MacGregor, and that way only. It will be an interesting experiment to get you Shanty Moir.” “Thank Heaven!” she said grimly. “We’ll soon be rid of you and your big talk. Then I can forget that any man gave me the name you gave me and lived to brag about it afterward.” He laughed, as one laughs at a petulant child. “You will never forget me,” he said. “You know that you will not forget me, if you live a thousand years.” “I have forgotten better men than you,” she said and went out, slamming the door. That evening Reivers sat up by the fire and further plied old MacGregor with questions concerning the mine. “You say that your brother claimed the mine lay to the north,” he said. “I suppose you have searched the north first of all?” “For a month I have done nothing else,” was the reply. “I have not gone far enough north. My brother James said it lay north from here; and ’twas north he and Shanty Moir went when they started on their last trip together, from which my brother did not return or send word.” “Dumont’s Camp and Fifty Mile, where Moir’s been on sprees; lay to the west.” “Northwest, aye. Four days’ hard mushing to Fifty Mile. Dumont’s hell-hole’s a day beyond.” “And you think the mine lies to the north of that?” “Aye. More like in a direct line north of here, for ’twas so they went when they left here.” Reivers hid the smile of triumph that struggled on his lips. The Dead Lands were strange country to him, but in the land north of Fifty Mile he was at home. In his wanderings he had spent months in that country in company with many other deluded men who thought to dig gold out of the bare, frozen tundra. He had found no gold there, and neither had any one else. There was no gold up there, could be none there, and, what was more important to him just now, there was no rock formation, nothing but muskeg and tundra. The mine could not be up north. It must, however, be within easy mushing distance of Fifty Mile and Dumont’s Camp, say two or three days, else Shanty Moir would not have hied himself to these settlements when the need for riot and wassail overcame him. “You know the ground between here and Fifty Mile, I suppose?” he said suddenly.