"Please—go on!" said Joanne.
"They found gold," repeated Aldous. "They found so much of it, Ladygray, that some of them went mad—mad as beasts. It was placer gold—loose gold, and MacDonald says that one day he and Jane filled their pockets with nuggets. Then something happened. A great storm came; a storm that filled the mountains with snow through which no living creature as heavy as a man or a horse could make its way. It came a month earlier than they had expected, and from the beginning they were doomed. Their supplies were almost gone.
"I can't tell you the horrors of the weeks and months that followed, as old Donald has told them to me, Joanne. You must imagine. Only, when you are deep in the mountains, and the snow comes, you are like a rat in a trap. So they were caught—eleven men and three women. They who could make their beds in sheets of yellow gold, but who had no food. The horses were lost in the storm. Two of their frozen carcasses were found and used for food. Two of the men set out on snowshoes, leaving their gold behind, and probably died.
"Then the first terrible thing happened. Two men quarrelled over a can of beans, and one was killed. He was the husband of one of the women. The next terrible thing happened to her—and there was a fight. On one side there were young Donald and the husband of the other woman; on the other side—the beasts. The husband was killed, and Donald and Jane sought refuge in the log cabin they had built. That night they fled, taking what little food they possessed, and what blankets they could carry. They knew they were facing death. But they went together, hand in hand.
"At last Donald found a great cave in the side of a mountain. I have a picture of that cave in my brain—a deep, warm cave, with a floor of soft white sand, a cave into which the two exhausted fugitives stumbled, still hand in hand, and which was home. But they found it a little too late. Three days later Jane died. And there is another picture in my brain—a picture of young Donald sitting there in the cave, clasping in his arms the cold form of the one creature in the world that he loved; moaning and sobbing over her, calling upon her to come back to life, to open her eyes, to speak to him—until at last his brain cracked and he went mad. That is what happened. He went mad."
Joanne's breath was coming brokenly through her lips. Unconsciously she had clasped her fingers about the hand Aldous rested on her pommel.
"How long he remained in the cave with his dead, MacDonald has never been able to say," he resumed.
"He doesn't know whether he buried his wife or left her lying on the sand floor of the cave. He doesn't know how he got out of the mountains. But he did, and his mind came back. And since then, Joanne—for a matter of forty years—his life has been spent in trying to find that cave. All those years his search was unavailing. He could find no trace of the little hidden valley in which the treasure-seekers found their bonanza of gold. No word of it ever came out of the mountains; no other prospector ever stumbled upon it. Year after year Donald went into the North; year after year he came out as the winter set in, but he never gave up hope.
"Then he began spending winter as well as summer in that forgotten world—forgotten because the early gold-rush was over, and the old Telegraph trail was travelled more by wolves than men. And always, Donald has told me, his beloved Jane's spirit was with him in his wanderings over the mountains, her hand leading him, her voice whispering to him in the loneliness of the long nights. Think of it, Joanne! Forty years of that! Forty years of a strange, beautiful madness, forty years of undying love, of faith, of seeking and never finding! And this spring old Donald came almost to the end of his quest. He knows, now; he knows where that little treasure valley is hidden in the mountains, he knows where to find the cave!"
"He found her—he found her?" she cried. "After all those years—he found her?"