“That’s true,” said Tregelly. “Hear, hear. Go on. What were you going to say?”
“That I have had it my own way for long enough, but now I’ll give up to you two. There’s no gold worth getting here, so if you both say, ‘Let’s make a dash back for life before we are shut in by the winter that seems to be coming on early,’ I’m ready, and we’ll make a brave fight for it.”
“And if we say, ‘No! Let’s go on and fight for the stuff to the last’—what then?”
“We will not look back,” cried Dallas, stepping outside, to stand gazing, with a far-off look in his eyes, straight along the narrow ravine running up into the savage-looking snow-covered mountains.
“Go on,” said Abel, who seemed to catch his cousin’s enthusiasm as he stood there, gradually growing whitened by the fine drifting snow.
“Go on?” said Dallas, without turning his head; “well, let’s go on. The gold must be up yonder, where it crumbles or is ground out of the rocky mountains, to be washed, in the course of ages, down the streams into the gravel and sand.”
“Ay, there must be plenty of it up yonder, my son,” said Tregelly, stepping out to shade his eyes and gaze upward towards the wilderness of mountains to the north, probably never yet trodden by the foot of man.
“Then I say, as we have come so far, let’s go on and find it,” cried Dallas; “and if we fail—well, it is only lying down at last to sleep! No one will know, for our bones will never be found. I feel as if I can’t go back—and you, Bel?”
For answer Abel laid his hand upon his cousin’s shoulder, and stood gazing with him into the dimly seen, mysterious land, just as, high up, one of the snowy summits suddenly grew bright and flashed in the feeble sunshine which played upon it for a few minutes before the snow-clouds closed in again.
And as if the one bright gleam had inspired him, Tregelly began to whistle softly.