Dripping from the waist with snow water, he reslung his traps, glanced back at the sombre bush behind him and then plunged into that ahead, while the dusk was closing in when he stood panting amidst the stumps of smaller trees. The mark of the axe was on them, and somebody had piled up a mound of rock and stones. Alton drew in a long breath and shook off his burden.
"Jimmy's claim," he said. "It may mean—most anything—to me."
Then, though his pulses throbbed, and he could feel his blood tingling, he fell to work systematically, groping about the excavation the dead man had made where the snowslide had rent apart the forest and scored out the rock for him. Here and there he smashed a fragment of it with the back of the axe, or picked up a discoloured stone of unusual gravity and compared it with the pieces he took out of a little bag, until at last he stood up stiffly and flung his head back.
All round him the forest rose dim and sombre, flinging back the roar of the rapid in long pulsations of sound, and its solitude was not lessened by the presence of the wet and weary man standing so still that his outline was scarcely perceptible against the trunks behind him. Save for the light of triumph in his eyes there was nothing in the whole scene to uplift the fancy. The man's garments were tattered, the river had not washed the mire from him, and one of his boots was gaping, but the discovery he had made was fraught with great possibilities for that lonely valley, and changes in the destinies of many other men. It had lain wrapped in stillness, a sanctuary for the beasts of the forest, countless ages since the world was young, being made ready slowly by frost and sun, and now man had come.
For five long minutes Alton looked into the future, and once more the fragrance of English roses seemed to steal faintly through the resinous odours of the firs. Then he shook himself, and glanced again dubiously at the river.
"And now," he said half aloud, "I'll get supper. It's a pity about that flour."
As those who have sojourned in the bush of that country know, one can sup on reasty pork and green tea alone, when it is impossible to get anything better, but there are more appetizing compounds, and when the edge of his appetite had been blunted, Alton stopped with greasy fingers in the frypan and a little smile upon his face.
"And Somasco's mine, and Carnaby—when I ask for it, with all that lies beneath me here," he said, and sat very still a space, with eyes that had lost their keenness fixed upon the bush. He did not see the big balsam in front of him nor the dusky firs, for it was once more the picture of a woman with red-gold hair standing in an English rose garden his fancy painted him.
Then he rose abruptly, and the smile faded, while his face grew grim again. "In the meanwhile I figure there's a good deal to do," he said.
He commenced it by picking the remnants of the pork out of the frying-pan, and when he had replaced them carefully in the bag, he filled the former with water and set it on the fire. That done, he proceeded to hew four square pegs, and spent some little time cutting, "One Discovery," upon the largest of them. Then with a compass in his palm he strode with even paces up the slope of the hill, and drove one of the pegs in, turned sharply, and floundered into the bush, where he hammered down a second, and came back along the river until he had paced off and marked down an oblong.