“So it is. A freak pocket. It could be nothing else in this district. ’Twas only by chance we found it, exploring the creek in here out of curiosity. ’Twas in the bowels of the warm spring up yon, where the creek starts, that the pocket was originally. The spring boiled it out into the creek, and the creek washed it down here in its bed of sand. The sand lodged here, against these rock walls. There’s about a hundred feet of the sand, running down under the cliffs, and it’s all pocket. Not a rich pocket, as you say, but Shanty Moir is filthy with nuggets and dust now, and there’ll be some more in the sand that’s left to work over. “Not a bonanza, man, but a good-sized fortune. ‘Twould be enough to send my Hattie to school. ’Twould give her all the comforts of the world. ’Twould make folk look up to her. And Shanty Moir, the devil’s spawn, has it in his keeping.” “And he’ll probably see that it continues in his keeping, too,” yawned Reivers. “Never!” swore MacGregor, rising to the bait. “Shanty Moir did me dirt too foul to prosper by it, and I’m a better man than he is, besides. The stuff will come into my hands, where it belongs, some way. I dinna see just how for the present. But the stuff, and my revenge I will have. E’en shackled as I am I’ll have my revenge, though it’s only to bite the windpipe out of Shanty Moir’s throat like a mad dog.” “Huh!” Reivers was lying face down on some blankets, apparently but little interested. “And suppose you do get Shanty Moir? What good will that do you? I’ll bet Shanty’s got the gold hid where nobody could find it without getting directions from him. Suppose you get him. Suppose you get all three of ’em. Shanty Moir being dead, the nuggets and dust probably’d be as completely lost as they were before you two boys found the pocket in the first place.” For a long time MacGregor sat in his corner of the dugout without replying. Reivers could see that at times he raised his head, even opened his mouth as if to speak, then sank back undecided. At last he hunched himself forward inch by inch to the front of the dugout and lifted the flap. The light of day had gone from the cavern. On the sand before the larger dugout blazed a brisk cooking-fire. In the confined space the light from its flames was magnified, reflecting from rock-wall and running water, and illuminating brightly the miserable hole in which Reivers and MacGregor lay. MacGregor held up the flap for several minutes, studying Reivers, and though Reivers looked back with the look in his eyes that made most men quail, the old man’s sharp grey eyes studied him unruffled, even as the eyes of his daughter had done before. “By the Big Nail, ’tis a man’s man!” muttered MacGregor, dropping the flap at last. “How in the name of self-respect did the likes of you fall prey to the cur, Shanty Moir?” “Self-respect?” sniggered Reivers. “Did you notice me out there when you were laying your curse on Moir?”