“Just like that. They were going off the very next day!”
“Not goin’ to leave vat poor man all alone vere, were vey?”
“No, they seemed quite ready to take the castaway and his rifle along. But”—Mr. Mar looked so grave that Jack came closer still—“to go up yonder with them to their underground winter home seemed to the castaway almost as horrible as to be left behind. Well, he had a day anyhow to think it over. His wound was still pretty painful, but he felt whatever happened, he ought to go over the tundra to that queer hill and take a look at the situation from the top. He must have been feverish, or he’d have realized that he wasn’t fit yet for hard exercise, and that there wasn’t a ghost of a likelihood of a settlement on the far side, since these natives knew nothing about it. Then you see, there was the awful danger that on this last day a rescue party should sail hopelessly by while he was away, or a whaling schooner pass, that he might have hailed. But no. He had got it into his head that if he could only reach the top of that glacier-carved height, all his troubles would be at an end. But he did have the sense to guard against the natives making off in his absence. He got one of the boys to come along with him.
“How old was vat boy?”
“Oh—a—about your size, but four or five years older, and very clever at throwing the bird-dart. No, I’ll tell you about that another time. They set off across the tundra. It wasn’t easy walking. It wasn’t walking at all. It was jumping from one moss knoll to another, or wading to the knees in the spongy hollows. But he’d look up at the peak and say: ‘Once I’m there—’ All the same, he had to call a halt several times. He’d find a dryish place, and he’d sit down and stare about him. They had long lost sight of the sand-spit. Even the sea had disappeared. To right and left, as far as you could see, tundra, tundra, nothing but tundra, a few pools shining in the hollows, and acres of sedge and moss, and low-growing ‘scrub-willow.’ Nothing else. Just this featureless plain till the land met the ocean and the ocean met the arctic ice. Suddenly, ‘What’s that?’ says the white man, and he pointed sou’west. The native stared. The light plays you queer tricks on the tundra. You often see lakes and ships and cities that aren’t there. But this didn’t look like a mirage, it was too simple, too distinct. Just two sticks stuck in the tundra. They might be one mile away, they might be ten. But there those sticks stood as clear against the blue sky as a couple of bean poles on a prairie farm.”
“Vey weren’t bean poles!” said the prescient listener.
“No,” agreed Mar. “The white man decided it must be some driftwood contrivance of the natives. Only the remarkable thing about it was, that he hadn’t noticed it before. For a thing like that is apt to strike you in a country where there wasn’t a tree for a hundred and fifty miles to the south’ard, and not one between you and the Pole. Well, he felt he’d know more about those sticks, and he’d know more about a lot besides, when he’d got to the top of the hill. So they went on; but the hill was a good way off. The ‘little white patches’ turned out to be vast fields of rotten snow. You went in up to your waist. The native jabbered, and seemed to be pointing out that it was better to go the long way round. There was less snow, and there didn’t seem to be such a chaos of talus—broken rock, you know—tumbled down from the peak. And the peak wasn’t a peak. It was more like a queer-shaped, flat stone set on a rock pedestal. ‘It’s all right,’ the man kept saying to himself, as they pushed on, ‘I shall feel it was worth it, once I’m on the top.’ And they went on and on. All of a sudden the man looked up, and realized that the feeling that had been haunting him was justified. The rock up there was like a giant anvil. So like, it was almost uncanny to think nature could have carved a stone with such whimsical exactness. ‘Just wait till I get up there,’ he said again, half-laughing to himself; ‘see if I don’t hammer out something!’ and he forgot his wound and how it hurt him to walk, and he jumped across a water hole to a higher knoll and saw that the ground on the other side fell gently down to a shallow valley. And the valley held a little stream in its lap. The white man realized when he saw that, how thirsty he was. He hadn’t dared to drink out of the standing pools on the tundra, and he went as fast as he could away from the anvil, and down the slope to the running water. He saw a dash of something white on the edge of the bank, as he hurried down to the creek, and he knew in the back of his head that it was a little heap of weather-bleached bones that shone so, off there in the grass. But he never stopped till he stood by the bed of the stream. He took up the water in his double hands and drank. It was good water, and he’d never been so thirsty before in his life. But the water spilled away through his fingers, and he felt he should never get enough. So he balanced himself over some stones, and he lay on his stomach, and reached his lips to the clear water. He drank and drank, with his half-shut eyes fixed on a spark of mica, that caught the light and was shining like a diamond under the water. No, it wasn’t mica. He saw plainer now. He leaned over a little further, and picked the bit of pyrites out of the wet gravel. The Esquimau boy saw the white man stand up as suddenly as if he’d been stung. But he held on to the thing he had taken into his palm, and he lifted his hand, like this, several times, and he turned the thing over and over, weighing it. One place in the stained, brassy-looking thing had been scratched, and every time the light caught that new abrasion, it glinted. The white man took out his knife and cut the substance. It was gold!”
“Weal gold?” said Jack Galbraith, gathering up his sprawled-out body with a squirrel-like quickness.
“Real gold,” answered Mar. “‘Any more stuff like this about?’ the white man asked. The native looked at the nugget, and shrugged indifferently. The white man dug about in the gravel with his hands and a sharp stone, and then he sat down and thought, with his eyes on the place where the nugget had been. The Esquimau boy got out his bird-dart, and went off a little way after a jack-snipe. The white man knew he ought to make a miner’s assay.”