"I have heard you out," proceeded the captain, smoothing his brow with an effort. "Now, hearken to me. You are green to these parts—very well. From my youth up I have heard stories of a Wonderland on whose threshold we now are. The Indians regard it with awe, and only peer into it from afar; but trapper and hunter have penetrated it by design or hazard, and all their tales cannot be campfire lies. Moreover, they have brought palpable evidences to the border. At Santa Fe I gambled with a trapper, whose jacket was bright with diamond buttons, stones that he found in a marvellous garden where the berries were turned to petrifaction as they grew; the chokecherries were rubies, the blueberries turquoises, the pigeon berries garnets, the Indian pears flawless crystal. He had collected a pouchful in half an hour, for which a Jew at St. Peter's gave him eight hundred dollars as they were turned over to him in the rough."
"Did you ever meet 'Oregon Ol,'[1] in your rustling about? He's a Nor'wester who has traversed this region more than most; he never wants for gold, and he hardly takes a trap out with him, and often brings back the powder he started with. And Marcellin's Choctaw Boy, and Hopeful Ed., and Simmins the Knifer, all familiar with the Yellowstone River to its uppermost forks. They have lined their pockets without handling the spade, on surface flakes alone. And Jim Ridge, the father of the Old Birds of the Sierras—with his copper face companion the Cherokee!" he went on, with a deep and sudden frown and a baleful glance, "Look at their equipments, at the way they buy the cream of everything, and take two or three trains a year up into the highlands. What is all that for? Provisioning themselves for staking out all the best spots in an auriferous region—the motherland of the gold and silver of which mere washings go down thither by driblets! Those mountaineers are leagued with the Yager, and they have found an enormously rich hole in the Yellowstone Basin. There's enough to make each of us twenty times, ay, fifty times a millionaire, and those dozen hunters selfishly stand us off! Go your way, if you are bent on it, without any dollars from me. I will persevere, though I am left alone, in striving to wrest this secret from that crew. I tell you, boys, I have had enough of a hard life with the prospect of walking off a mule's back till a rope round my neck brings me to a short stop. I want, with the worst kind of want, to go see Europe with a big draft on the Bank of England, and have some of these Eye-talian princelings black my boots before I die in 'em."
Then, seeing that he had kindled his hearers with cupidity, he concluded:
"Who loves gold galore, comes along with Mr. Pirate King!"
"I catch on," cried Joe, as if inspirited.
"They do say, though, that the Yellowstone Valley is haunted—spirits of Injin devils guard the incalculable treasures, spit hot poison at the invader, smother him in scalding mud, shower rocks upon him from tall bluffs—so if you are afraid of what hasn't daunted Old Jim and his band, why, leave me and Joe to have the first chop 'rise' on you when we meet in Nevada City, me and Joe regularly bulging out with whisky, good hotel grub, and gold and diamonds, and you scraping the gutter for the dimes swept out of the stores! Look here! If in ten days we are not knee deep in golden sands, in a vale where eternal summer reigns, then lead me out and shoot me!"
There was a pause: the Frenchman's eyes blazed like fanned coals, the Englishman panted noisily and ground his teeth with a bulldog's anticipatory glee.
"We are on a sure soft thing now," pursued the captain, clinching the nail which he had driven home. "I don't know how it is, but I am confident our vein of bad luck has fined out to a hair, and that fortune is going to do a smile."
"All right," said Dick, after a glance at the Frenchman, who nodded, "we'll tail on for ten days."
"Then another drink round. Joe, pick me out four or five fellows who can use snowshoes without laying themselves up with the mal du racquet (snowshoe lameness), and let them scout about to see if the Indian sign crops up over the new snows."