"Look here, Horace! What's this?" he asked, as he came up panting. In his hand he held a large, wet lump of greenish-blue, clayey mud. Horace took it, poked into it, and turned it over. Then he glanced sympathetically at his brother's face.
"I'm afraid it isn't anything, old boy," he said. "Only ordinary mud. The real blue clay is more of a gray blue, you know, and generally as hard as bricks."
Fred pitched the stuff into the river and said nothing, but his face showed his disappointment. He had carried that lump of clay for over four miles, in the conviction that he had discovered the diamond-bearing soil.
Macgregor came in shortly afterward with nothing more valuable than two ducks that he had shot.
The boys were discouraged that evening. After the rain they could find little dry wood. It was nearly dark before Fred began to stir up the usual pan of flapjacks, and "Mac" set himself to the task of cutting up one of the ducks to fry. They were too much depressed to talk, and the camp was quiet, when suddenly a crackling tread sounded in the underbrush.
"What's that?" cried Horace sharply. And as he spoke, a man stepped out of the shadow, and advanced into the firelight.
"Bo' soir! Hello!" he said, curtly.
"Hello! Good evening!" cried Fred and Mac, much startled.
"Sit down. Grub'll be ready in a minute," Horace added. Hospitality comes before everything else in the North.
"Had grub," answered the man; but he sat down on a log beside the fire, and surveyed the whole camp with keen, quick eyes.