"Come ahead then." McCall was upon his feet, his hat on his head and his cigar lighted all in little more than an instant.
In ten minutes the party was formed and had clattered out of Lebarge, back along the MacLeod trail. There were five men in the little group, Drennen, Sothern, McCall and two mining experts in the pay of the Northwestern. As they swept out of Lebarge, rounding into the cañon where the trail twisted ahead of them, Drennen saw two men looking after them. One was Marc Lemarc who had accompanied him to Lebarge; the other Lieutenant Max.
Once in the trail the five men strung out in a line, Drennen in the lead. It was easy to see his impatience in the hot pace he set for them, and they thought that it was no less easy to understand it. But for once they followed a man who thought less of his gold mine than of a girl.
Drennen's gold mine itself plays no part in this story. He was never to see it again after this day, although it was to pour many thousands of dollars into his pockets from a distance. In the West Canadian Mining and Milling News, date of August 9, 1912, appears a column-and-a-half article upon the subject, readily accessible to any who are not already familiar with the matter which excited so wide an Interest at the time and for many months afterwards. The article is authoritative to the last detail. It explains how the Golden Girl became a lost mine in 1799, and how it happened that while David Drennen had discovered it in 1912 it had been hidden to other eyes than his. A series of earthquakes of which we have record, occurring at the beginning of the nineteenth century, bringing about heavy snowslides and landslides, had thrown the course of one of the tributaries of the Little MacLeod from its bed into a new channel where a sudden depression had sunk the golden vein of the lost mine.
Here, just before the winter of 1911-12 shut down, David Drennen had found a nugget which he had concealed, saying nothing about it. The snows came and he went back to MacLeod's Settlement to wait for the coming of springtime and passable trails. The first man to pack out of the Settlement prospecting, he had come to the spot which last year he had marked under the cliffs known locally as Hell's Lace. The trail had been rotten underfoot and he had slipped and fallen into one of the black pools. Clambering out he had found the thing he sought; where the trail had broken away was gold, much gold. In the bed of the stream itself, nicely hidden for a hundred years by the cold, black water, swept into deep pools, jammed into sunken crevices, was the old lost gold of the Golden Girl.
The West Canadian Mining and Milling News of the same date goes on to mention that the last official act of Mr. Andrew McCall as Local Agent for the Northwestern, had been the purchasing of his claim from David Drennen at the latter's figure, namely one hundred thousand dollars in cash, and an agreement of a royalty upon the mine's output.
Despite Drennen's impatience to be riding trail again it was a week before the deal was consummated. Half a mile above his claim it was possible for the engineers to throw the stream again into its old bed, a score of men and three days' work accomplishing the conditions which had obtained before the period of seismic disturbance. Then followed days of keen expert investigation. Even when they were sure these men who know as most men do not the value of caution when they are allowed to take time for caution, postponed their final verdict. But at last the thing was done and McCall, taking his train for the East, left Lebarge with a conscious glow of satisfaction over the last work done as superintendent of the Western Division.
Marshall Sothern, returning from the railroad station, found Drennen waiting for him in his private office.
"Well, Mr. Drennen," he said quietly, going about the table and to his chair, "how does it feel to be worth a cool hundred thousand?"
"It feels," cried the younger man sharply, his voice ringing with a hint of excitement which had been oddly lacking in him throughout the whole transaction, "like power! Like a power I've been hungering for for ten years! May I have your stenographer for a few moments, sir?"