"Why, I don't know," said Joe; "must be a hundred dollars worth of it, if it's gold."
"A hundred dollars! Pooh, Joe, you don't know anything," was the reply. "You said it weighed fifty pounds, and if it weighs as much as that, there must be thousands of dollars worth."
"My!" said Joe, "is there as much as that? I know what I'll do."
"What?" said Jack.
"I'll get me a good gun," replied Joe, "that's all I want, a good gun, and maybe a good buffalo horse."
"Why," said Jack, "if that's gold you can buy yourself all the guns and all the horses you want, and a lodge for yourself and still have plenty left."
"What'll you do, Jack, with yours?" said Joe.
"Oh, I don't know," said Jack, "I'd like to buy a lot of nice furs and robes to take home, but I expect we've got trade stuff enough to buy those things with, maybe I'll just take it home as it is. But hold on," he said, as a sudden thought struck him. "This doesn't belong to me; this is yours, you found it."
"No I didn't," said Joe, "we both found it together, and anyhow if you hadn't been along, I'd have just left it there; I wouldn't have carried a lot of yellow sand into the camp. I never saw anything like this before, and I'd a-thought it was just some kind of queer gravel. We have been partners right along, almost since you came into the camp, and we've got to be partners now."
"Well," said Jack, "we'll see what Hugh says about it. After all maybe it isn't anything. I've heard my uncle talk about fool's gold, and one day when we were coming up, I picked up apiece of yellow heavy stuff like this and asked Hugh what it was, and he told me some queer name that I can't remember, and then said some folks called it fool's gold, and he cracked it on the axe and it broke into little pieces. It looked something like this stuff we've got only the edges were sharp and not round like this, and it was bright and shiny too, and not dull, the way this is."