"'You say you're a mining engineer,' she said, 'and you know
this country. Can you name a pay-creek that has the color of
that gold!'

"I couldn't! There wasn't a trace of silver. It was almost
pure, and I told her so.

"'You bet,' she said. 'I sell that for nineteen dollars an
ounce. You can't get over seventeen for Eldorado gold, and
Minook gold don't fetch quite eighteen. Well, that was what I
found among the bones--eight horse-loads of it, one hundred and
fifty pounds to the load.'

"'A quarter of a million dollars!' I cried out.

"'That's what I reckoned it roughly,' she answered. 'Talk about
Romance! And me a slaving the way I had all the years, when as
soon as I ventured out, inside three days, this was what
happened. And what became of the men that mined all that gold?
Often and often I wonder about it. They left their horses,
loaded and tied, and just disappeared off the face of the
earth, leaving neither hide nor hair behind them. I never heard
tell of them. Nobody knows anything about them. Well, being the
night-born, I reckon I was their rightful heir.'

Trefethan stopped to light a cigar.

"Do you know what that girl did? She cached the gold, saving
out thirty pounds, which she carried back to the coast. Then
she signaled a passing canoe, made her way to Pat Healy's