Harvey’s voice shook a little. Presently he steadied it, and went on briskly:
“Silver was not so cheap then as it is now. Even in the dim moonlight he knew what he was lookin’ at. He was lookin’ at a vein of almost pure silver them sliding stones had uncovered.
“He laid quite a long time, just lookin’ at it. Then the situation come home to him.
“He didn’t know where he was. He didn’t know where the silver was. He couldn’t get his bearings. He didn’t dare mark the place too plain, for fear someone else’d find it. After a while, he made shift to build some little heaps of stones. Then he went on as well as he could. You see, if he’d stayed by the place till daylight he’d have been dead in that weather. He had to risk it.
“He found his way back to his wife, somehow. He never remembered anything of what happened after he left that place.
“He was near dead, and they thought he was ravin’. Maybe he was. He was ill a long spell. They were helped. When he was sick folks was kind, and they took kindness where they’d been too proud to take it before. Even when he was ill he fought to keep a tight hold on his tongue. When he could crawl he went out to find his claim.
“He couldn’t find it.
“Sweatin’ and tremblin’, the ghost of a man, day after day he wandered in the hills, lookin’ for it. He quartered the ground like a hunting dog, but he couldn’t find the place. There was a hundred spots like his memory of it; a thousand slopes of loose stones. The rain and the wind had swept his little rock-piles away. He had nothin’ to go by. Wealth beyond all he’d thought of, all he struggled for, all he prayed for—for her—was there, somewhere in them hills under his feet, and he couldn’t find it.
“Men thought he was mad. He let them think so. Maybe, as the time went on, he was pretty near mad.
“For the winter went, and the spring, and still he was trampin’ the hills, seekin’ the claim he couldn’t find.”