Grenfell stopped him with a gesture.
“I’m going to talk. Don’t interrupt. Mr. Weston was once or twice a good friend to me, and you have seen me through a few times lately. Now I know a quartz lead that’s run through with wire gold quite rich enough to mill at a profit, but I can’t go up and look for it in the bush myself. When I walk any distance my knees get shaky. Make you firm offer—even shares to come up with me.”
“Where is it?”
Grenfell turned and glanced toward the dim line of snow that gleamed high up above the forests in the north.
“There’s a lake—the Lake of the Shadows—Verneille called it that,” he said dreamily. “It lies in a hollow of the range with the black firs all round. There’s a creek at one side, with a clear pool where it bends, and I came there one day very hot and hungry with the boots worn off me. I think”—and by his tense face he seemed to be trying earnestly to remember something—“we were quite a few days crossing that range, and our provisions were running put when we hit the valley.”
“Well?” prompted the track-grader when he stopped.
“I crawled down to the pool to drink. There were pebbles in it and a ledge above. There were specks in the pebbles, and specks that showed plainer in the ledge. The stones were shot with the metal when I broke one or two of those I took out.”
He fumbled inside his pocket and produced a little bag from which he extracted a few broken bits of rock. Weston, to whom he passed them, could see that little threads of metal ran through them. “You’re quite sure it’s gold?” the other man inquired.
“Am I sure!”
Grenfell smiled compassionately.