“What?”
“I says, ‘I’m figurin’ on findin’ the Mother Lode up in them hills yonder.’ ‘That’s right,’ he said, an’ his eyes wus kind o’ wild an’ glassy. ‘Up over yonder?’ I said. ‘Yes,’ says he; ‘up North. That’s where the Mother Lode is.’ An’ I think from what he said, he’d called his discovery-claim ‘The Lode Star.’”
“What made you think—”
“Course he wus kind o’ queer—out of his head, y’ know, fur he called it the ‘Mother Lode Star.’ An’ he wus terrible secret about it. All the time gettin’ away from the subject and talkin’ about the dawg.”
“Well—”
“Wa-al, they wusn’t more’n half a dozen people at Polaris then, an’ nobody’d found anything to make a boom out of. But they all hung on. And they made presents to that feller, took him grub regillar. An’ other folks kep’ comin’ jest becuz that man wus there. An’ they all knoo he’d struck it rich. An’ they all knoo he wus dyin’. That was what they wus waitin’ for. I didn’t wait, even them few days they said he had to live. The snow wus beginning t’ fly an’ I had to go back to Glaysher and get Mrs. Blumpitty an’ our party out before navigation closed. But I said to myself, ‘I’ll risk it—fur the Mother Lode!’ An’ I did. Went up over the hills to the north, in a bee line from that cabin o’ his till I come ter—” Blumpitty’s voice dropped still lower and he hesitated, while, like one who scarce dares move lest he break some spell, slowly he looked round, and seemed to forget how to turn back. He remained so, sitting awry, listening.
“It’s only some one moving about in Mr. Dorn’s room overhead. You found the Mother Lode?”
He found he was able to twist himself back by dint of drawing out his watch. “When I get t’ thinkin’ about it I clean forget the time.” He stood up. “I guess I got t’ be goin’.”