Jack Among the Indians; Or, A Boy's Summer on the Buffalo Plains

by George Bird Grinnell

"Oh, I hope that this is gold, it will be great."

When they reached camp, they unsaddled and carefully carried their bundle into Pis'kun's lodge. Hugh was not there, but the boys were too impatient to wait for him long, and after a few moments, Jack left Joe on guard over the bundle, while he started out through the camp to find Hugh. Soon he came upon him, sitting in the shade of the lodges, smoking and talking with Last Bull and another old man, and going up to him with an air of much mystery, he asked him if he wouldn't come to the lodge. Hugh rose and accompanied him, looking at him meanwhile, with an expression of amused curiosity, for the boy was evidently big with some secret which he was anxious to reveal.

When they were seated in the lodge, the boys began to untie their bundle, and while doing so, told Hugh the story of their find. As they talked, his interest increased, and before the contents of the legging had been turned out into the pan borrowed from Pis'kun's wife, he was as much excited as the boys themselves. The legging was lifted up and slowly the mass of dirt mingled with yellow grains slipped out into the pan, and the moment that Hugh saw it he said, "By the Lord, boys, you've surely struck it." He took up one of the larger grains, bit it, tried it with his knife and then whispered impressively, "It's gold." For an hour or two all three were busy cleaning the grass, the soil and bits of rotten buckskin from among the yellow grains, which half filled the pan. When this was done, Hugh lifted it from the ground, and after weighing it carefully in his hand, said, "Boys, there must be twenty-five pounds of this dust. I wouldn't be surprised if there was five or six thousand dollars right here in that pan."

"My," said Jack, "that's an awful lot of money."

"Yes," said Hugh, "that's a lot of money. But how did it get there? That's what I want to know. We will have to go there to-morrow and look the ground over right carefully; somebody must have dropped that sack there, right on the prairie. Didn't you see nothing else there?"

"No," said Jack, "nothing; it was just lying there half covered up by the dirt and the grass, and Joe walked right over it before he saw it."

"Hold on, Jack," said Joe, "show White Bull that powder charger."

"That's so," said Jack, and he fished the tube out of his pocket.

Hugh looked at it carefully from all sides and pondered. After he had thought a little while, he said, "Look here boys, this is queer. I have seen that powder charger before, and I know the man that made it. 'B. L.,' that's Baptiste Lajeunesse, he was one of the old time trappers and I was in Benton when he made that charger. That's gold too. It was more than thirty years ago. Bat had just come in from the mountains with a big lot of furs, and sold them and got his money, and had started out to have a good time. Just before he got into the Post though, he had lost his charger. It was one, made him long before, out of a piece of mountain sheep's horn, by a great friend, and he thought the world of it. He kept talking all the time about that charger, and when he began to spend his money and to drink, he talked about it more and more. Now, Bat was a pretty handy man with tools, and when he was a boy, he had been blacksmith at the Hudson Bay Co., and that afternoon, when he was pretty drunk, as he was going along the street, he suddenly stopped and ran into the blacksmith shop and took a hammer and fished a twenty dollar gold piece out of his pocket, and began to hammer it out on the anvil, and before any of us knew what he was after, he had made himself this charger and scratched his initials on it, and tied it with a string to his shirt in front, where he used to carry his old charger when he was in town. A few days after that, after Bat had spent all his money, he started off again into the mountains, and I have never seen him from that day to this.