The girl felt her face grow hot under those sharp old eyes. She scarcely knew what to say, and yet could give no sensible reason for such embarrassment; and then—
"The lad—what lad?" she asked at last.
"Oh—ay. I clean forgot he is no lad to you. Kalitan, will ye be building up that fire a bit? When we have quality to visit we must give them a warm welcome, if no more. An' the lad, as I was sayin'," he continued, "was but Genesee—no other; though he looked more the lad when I called him so first."
"You are such old friends, then?"
"No so old as so close, ye might say. It's a matter o' five year now since he come up in these hills wi' some men who were prospectin', an' one an' another got tired and dropped down the country again till only Genesee was left. He struck that haunted hill in the Maple range that they all said was of no good, an' he would na leave it. There he stuck in very stubbornness, bewitched like by it; an' the day before his flittin' in the fall found him clear through the hill, helped a bit by striking into an old mine that nobody knew aught of. Think o' that!—dug into a mine that had been abandoned by the Indians generations ago, most like."
"I did not know that the Indians ever paid attention to mining. They seem to know no use for gold or silver until the white men teach them it."
"True enough; but there the old mine stands, as a clear showin' that some o' the heathen, at some time, did mine in that range; an' the stone mallets an' such like that he stumbled on there shows that the cave was not the result o' accident."
"And has he at last given it up as hopeless?"
"That's as time may happen to tell," answered the old man sagely; "an' old Daddy Time his own self could na keep his teeth shut more tight than can Genesee if there's a bit secret to hold. But o' the old mine he said little when he was takin' the trail, only, 'It has kept these thousand o' years, Davy—it will most like keep until I get back.'"
From that speech Rachel gathered the first intimation that Genesee's absence from the Kootenai country was only a transient one. Was he then to come back and again drop his life into its old lines? She did not like to think of it—or to question. But that winter visit to "Ole Man Mac," as Kalitan called him, was the beginning of an avowed friendship between the old hermit of the northern hills and the young girl from the southern ones.