But, through whatever far distances he went, he was generally known by repute and inspired interest. Men stood aloof but they watched him and spoke of him among themselves. No longer did they call him No-luck Drennen. He came to be known as Lucky Drennen. Word had gone about that it was indeed true that he had rediscovered the old, lost Golden Girl and that he had made a fortune from its sale to the Northwestern people. The mine was operating already; experts said that it was greater than the Duchess which electrified the mining world in 1897 when Copworth and Kennely brought it into prominence; and the Golden Girl was paying a royalty to David Drennen. Drennen himself did not know how his account at the Lebarge bank took upon itself new importance every third month when Marshall Sothern deposited the tenth share of the net receipts.
Seeking Ygerne Bellaire and those with her, Drennen had gone from Fanning into Whirlwind Valley, across the Pass and into the forests beyond Neuve Patrie. He had followed rumours of three men and a woman and after six or seven weeks came upon them, trappers and the wife of one of them. He showed nothing of his emotions as he stared at them with cold, hard eyes. He went back to Fanning, crossed the MacLeod to Brunswick Towers and to the new village of Qu' Appelle. Spring had passed into summer and he had had no clue which was not a lie like the first. In all seeming the earth had opened to receive those whom he followed.
Since he so seldom spoke, since when he did it was to ask concerning three men and a woman, those who knew anything of him at all knew that he was seeking Sefton, Lemarc, Garcia and a girl whom those who had heard of her from the men of MacLeod's Settlement, called "the Princess." A figure of interest already, Drennen gained double interest now.
"He'll find them one day, mes chers," grunted the big blacksmith at St. Anne's. "He'll do anything, that man. Le bon Diable is his papa. Hein? Voyez, mon petit stupide! Last week, because he needs no more and because the devil likes him, he finds gold again in the Nez Cassé! Nom d'un gros porc! But who has dreamed to find gold in the Nez Cassé? Oho! Some day he comes up with three man and la princesse. And then …"
He broke off, plunging his hot iron into his tub of water, so that the hissing of the heated metal and the angry puff of steam might conclude in fitting eloquence the thing he had in mind.
Once, just after Drennen had for the second time in six months found gold, he heard the new epithet which had been given him: Lucky Drennen. He turned and stared at the man who had spoken the name so that the fellow fell back, flushing and paling under the terrible eyes. Then, with his snarling laugh, Drennen passed on.
Until the winter came to lock the gateways into the mountains he was everywhere the adventurous were pushing in the land of the North Woods. He was the last man to take the trail from Gabrielle to the open.
But though winter lifted a frozen hand to drive him back he did not for a single day give over his search. He went then down to the railroads. Banff knew him and came to know just as much of his story as it could guess from the eternal question in his heart and now and then on his lips, and from the fact that he had money. Vancouver knew him, coming and going where a man might search such quarry as his, in gambling halls, high and low, in cafes, at hotels. For he had had a hint that perhaps Ygerne and the men with her had gone on to Vancouver.
In January he drew heavily against his account in the bank of Lebarge. The money, or at least a great part of it, went to a detective agency in Vancouver, another in Victoria, another even as far east as Quebec. Money went also to New Orleans and brought him no little information of the earlier lives of Ygerne Bellaire and Marc Lemarc, together with the assurance that neither of them had returned to the South.
Thus he learned the story which he had refused to hear from her own lips, the reason of her flight from New Orleans. Having no parents living, she had lived in the household of her guardian, a merchant named Jules Bondaine. She had had trouble with Bondaine, the cause of the affair not being clearly understood except by Bondaine himself, the girl and, perhaps, Marc Lemarc, her cousin. The confidential agency in the southern city to which Drennen had turned apprised him of these facts and let him draw his own deductions: It was known that Lemarc was a suitor for the girl's hand; that Bondaine had seemed very strongly to favour Lemarc; that Bondaine was high-handed, Ygerne Bellaire high-tempered; that, at a time when Mme. Bondaine and her two daughters were away from home over night, Bondaine and the girl had a hot dispute; that that night, while in the library, Ygerne Bellaire shot her guardian; that he would in all probability have died had it not been for the opportune presence of Marc Lemarc, even the household servants being out; that that night Ygerne Bellaire left New Orleans and had not been heard of since by Bondaine or the authorities.