“From the man that’s dead.”
“Ya-as. Leastways, they said he hadn’t more’n a few days to live. Ya-as, dyin’ up there at Polaris! Everybody in the camp knoo he’d struck it rich. Nobody could find out where.”
“How did they know he’d struck—”
“Becuz he wus so secret about everything. Where he’d come from. Where he wus goin’ if he got well, and most of all”—Blumpitty looked round and sunk his low voice—“where he got his nuggets and dust from.”
“Oh, he had nuggets—”
“Yes, nuggets and dust, too. Good and plenty.”
“He showed it to you?”
“No. He wus terrible secret about it. Terrible afraid somebody’d rob him. Kind o’ sick you know about it.” Slowly Blumpitty tapped his yellow-gray forehead. “But he allowed he’d found something worth while an’ he never let his bundle o’ dust out o’ sight. Day an’ night he kep’ it jest under his hand. Everybody nosin’ around, tryin’ to be friends with him. One day I wus passin’, an’ his dawg went fur me. I picked up a stone. ‘Don’t y’ do it,’ he calls out o’ the sod cabin, where he wus layin’ with the door open. ‘Don’t y’ do nothin’ to that dawg,’ he says. I explained the dawg wus doin’ things to me. ‘Come in here,’ he said, ‘an’ she won’t touch you.’ So I did, an’ we talked a while.”
“Well?”
“He asked me kind o’ sarcastic, was I ‘lookin’ fur the Mother Lode?’ I said I guessed I wusn’t no different from other men, except that I wusn’t hangin’ round a sick man fur to get his secrets out o’ him. ‘No,’ he said, ‘I ain’t never seen you hangin’ round.’ An’ then he told me.”