Kincaid noticed that he had not mentioned his father's name, so he asked finally:
"Where's Dubois? Where's your father? I came to see him."
The childish face hardened instantly.
"I don't know. He cleaned up the sluice-boxes late last fall after the first freeze. Mother helped him clean up. He got a lot of gold—the most yet—and he took it with him and all the horses. He said he was going out for grub but he never came back. Then the big snows came in the mountains and we knew he couldn't get in. We ate our bacon up first, then the flour give out, and the beans. The baby cried all the time 'cause 'twas hungry and Petie and me wore our shoes out huntin' through the hills. It was awful, m'sieu."
Kincaid swallowed a lump in his throat.
"Do you think he'll come back?" the younger boy asked eagerly.
"He might have stayed outside longer than he intended and found he couldn't get in for the snow, or he might have tried and froze in the pass. It's deep there yet," was Kincaid's evasive reply.
"He'll never come back," said the older boy slowly, "and—he wasn't froze in the pass."
It was still May when Dick Kincaid climbed out of the valley with the whimpering squaw clinging to the horn of his saddle while the swarthy little "breeds" trudged manfully in the trail close to his heels. The violets still made purple blotches along the bank of the noisy stream, the thorn trees and the service-berry bushes were still like fragrant banks of snow, the grass in the valley was as green and the picture as serenely beautiful as when first he had stopped to gaze upon it, but it no longer looked like paradise to Dick Kincaid.
They stopped to rest and let the horses get their breath when they reached the edge of the snows, and for a time they stood in silence looking their last upon the valley below them. The older boy drew his thin hand from Kincaid's big palm and touched the gun swinging in its holster on his hip.