Spurling laughed shortly, and said, "It isn't your help that I'm asking; it's you that I'm trying to help. Here, look at that." He passed something to him. "I didn't act squarely by you in the Klondike, and I want to make up for it now. When we made that strike in Drunkman's Shallows, the success of it turned my head; even then, if you'd not been so impatient, I think I should have come to myself and have behaved decently. You put my back up with your suspicions, and by seeming to claim a part of my wealth as though it were yours by right. But I'm anxious to forget that now."
In the meanwhile, Granger had been examining the thing which had been placed in his hands. It was wrapped up carefully in several rags, which were knotted and tedious to untie. When he had stript them off, he found that they contained a nugget, somewhat bigger than the one which Eyelids had shown him, but of the same rounded formation, as though it had been taken from a river-bed. "Where did you get it?" he asked excitedly.
"Where the half-breed got his—from the Forbidden River. Does El Dorado seem more possible to you now?"
But Granger was thinking, and he did not answer the question. Suddenly the dream of his life had become recoverable. He had forgotten Peggy, and Murder Point, and even Spurling himself. Once more in imagination he was sailing up the Great Amana, following in his father's track. Once more he saw, as in Raleigh's day, the deer come down to the water's side, as if they were used to the keeper's call; and he watched anxiously ahead lest, in the rounding of the latest bend, the shining city should meet his sight and the salt expanse of Parima, from whose shores its towers are said to rise. In his eyes was the vision of the island near Puna, which Lopez wrote about, with its silver herb-gardens, and its flowers of gold, and its trees of gold and of silver; and in his ears was the tinkling music, which the sea-wind was wont to make as it swept through the metal forest, causing its branches to clang and its leaves to shake. He was far away from Keewatin now, making the phantom journey to the land of his desire.
"Does El Dorado seem more possible to you now?"
He turned to Spurling a face which had grown thin with earnestness, "Druce, tell me quickly," he said, "how long will it take us to get there?"
"To get to El Dorado? The answer to that you should know best. But to get to the place on the Forbidden River where this gold was found? Oh, about five days."
"Let us go there at once, then, before Beorn finds us out."
"Ah, Beorn! The old trapper who put that half-breed on my track!"
"Did he do that? Tell me about it."