"I hope so! You're not a quitter, and we'll hold on while we can, but I think we'll talk about something else. Well, I've examined the specimen of ore you brought back. It looks like high-grade stuff and certainly carries enough metal to pay for smelting."
"What do you think about Strange's tale?"
Scott knitted his brows. "I did think the man a drunken crank and the lode an illusion that had grown on him by degrees until he really believed in the ore. When you get the tanking habit such things happen. One specimen certainly doesn't prove very much; but since Strange gave it to his daughter a long time before we knew him, I'm willing to revise my judgment."
"Miss Strange is persuaded that he did find the lode. She tells me he led a very industrious and sober life at home."
"It's rather curious you met the girl," Scott observed.
"I don't think so. When we found her address among the truck Strange had left with the foreman, it was the proper thing for me to tell her he was drowned. This led to another letter or two, and when I said I was going to Montreal she asked me to meet her."
"Is she like Strange?"
"Not at all," Thirlwell declared. "In fact, although her letters ought to have prepared me, I got something of a surprise. She was not the kind of girl I had expected to meet. I understand she teaches at a Toronto school."
"She must have some talent to get a post there," Scott remarked when he had asked the name of the school. Then he paused and vaguely indicated the North. "Well, it's a romantic story! Nobody knows yet what there is in the rocks up yonder, but we have heard of other prospectors striking pay-dirt and making nothing of their discovery. Rumors about mysterious lodes are common in a mineral belt, and while they're often imaginative, my notion is that now and then there's some fact behind the fiction. Fur-traders in Alaska heard such tales long before the Klondyke strike."
He stopped, for there were steps outside, and Thirlwell, leaning forward, saw a man come up the trail. The fellow had a dark, sullen face and wore an old gray shirt and ragged overalls. He walked with a slight limp, in consequence of getting his foot frost-bitten on a winter journey, but he was an expert trapper and had penetrated far into the wilds. When skins were scarce he worked at the mine, but generally left his employment after a drunken bout.