“For a month I have done nothing else,” was the reply. “I have not gone far enough north. My brother James said it lay north from here; and ’twas north he and Shanty Moir went when they started on their last trip together, from which my brother did not return or send word.”
“Dumont’s Camp and Fifty Mile, where Moir’s been on sprees; lay to the west.”
“Northwest, aye. Four days’ hard mushing to Fifty Mile. Dumont’s hell-hole’s a day beyond.”
“And you think the mine lies to the north of that?”
“Aye. More like in a direct line north of here, for ’twas so they went when they left here.”
Reivers hid the smile of triumph that struggled on his lips. The Dead Lands were strange country to him, but in the land north of Fifty Mile he was at home. In his wanderings he had spent months in that country in company with many other deluded men who thought to dig gold out of the bare, frozen tundra. He had found no gold there, and neither had any one else. There was no gold up there, could be none there, and, what was more important to him just now, there was no rock formation, nothing but muskeg and tundra. The mine could not be up north.
It must, however, be within easy mushing distance of Fifty Mile and Dumont’s Camp, say two or three days, else Shanty Moir would not have hied himself to these settlements when the need for riot and wassail overcame him.
“You know the ground between here and Fifty Mile, I suppose?” he said suddenly.
“’Tis my trapping-ground,” replied MacGregor.
So the mine couldn’t be east of the settlements. It was to the west or the south.