"Picture it yourself," Trefethan broke off to say. "The canoe
was wrecked and lost, and everybody pounded to death on the
rocks except her. She went ashore hanging on to a dog's tail,
escaping the rocks and washing up on a tiny beach, the only one
in miles.

"'Lucky for me it was the mainland,' she said. 'So I headed
right away back, through the woods and over the mountains and
straight on anywhere. Seemed I was looking for something and
knew I'd find it. I wasn't afraid. I was night-born, and the
big timber couldn't kill me. And on the second day I found it.
I came upon a small clearing and a tumbledown cabin. Nobody had
been there for years and years. The roof had fallen in. Rotted
blankets lay in the bunks, and pots and pans were on the stove.
But that was not the most curious thing. Outside, along the
edge of the trees, you can't guess what I found. The skeletons
of eight horses, each tied to a tree. They had starved to
death, I reckon, and left only little piles of bones scattered
some here and there. And each horse had had a load on its back.
There the loads lay, in among the bones--painted canvas sacks,
and inside moosehide sacks, and inside the moosehide
sacks--what do you think?'"

She stopped, reached under a comer of the bed among the spruce
boughs, and pulled out a leather sack. She untied the mouth and
ran out into my hand as pretty a stream of gold as I have ever
seen--coarse gold, placer gold, some large dust, but mostly
nuggets, and it was so fresh and rough that it scarcely showed
signs of water-wash.