Seymour picked up the specimen. It was of the same grayish, metallic substance as the hand-shaped piece which Moira had given him at the mission. This one, however, held no yellow offering.
"Richer than gold!" In thought, Seymour murmured Bart's exclamation of promise to Mrs. Caswell.
He believed that at last he knew the answer to one part of the Glacier Creek riddle. But he said nothing to the girl about his hopes as he pocketed the fragment.
"You said the Siwashes would tell you which of the two men rode away from the gulch, the morning of the murder," he reminded her. "Did they?"
"That's another peculiar thing," she replied, lines of perplexity wrinkling her stained brow. "My klootchmen friends insist that both Kluger and Bonnemort were here as usual all that morning. They made hiyu clean-up—gathered much gold—that Thursday morning and are positive they are not mistaken about the kind white men. The Indians haven't heard that Bart was murdered; they still are chuckling at the way he was run out of the gulch."
"That would seem to leave us cold—as cold as we are on the trail of that scoundrel Karmack, wouldn't it?"
Not a flicker did the girl show to indicate that she had hope of hearing something in that particular get-your-man direction.
But within the tent Seymour saw something else to convince him that the search for Bart's slayer was exceedingly "warm." In the presence of this second inanimate witness, he was more anxious than ever to get the girl safely out of the gulch—before the fireworks.
"I'm nearly through in here," he went on. "Have you planned how you will get yourself out?"
"I can go back the way I came, I suppose," she answered with a pout that was not as effective as it would have been had she been naturally clad. "But I thought you were going to open the cañon gate—from the inside out?"