But what use to make of his discovery he hardly knew, since he had slunk away from the world, ablaze with hatred for his fellow-men, intending to live alone for the rest of his days. His grudge was as bitter now as then, and he determined, therefore, to keep his find a secret. That would be a grim, if unsatisfactory, sort of revenge, he reflected. He would take what he wished, and let other men wear out their lives searching unsuccessfully. Those strangers to the westward, for instance, would toil and suffer through the long winter, then leave discouraged. There was money here for them and for hundreds—thousands—like them, but he decided to guard his secret and to let it die with him.
McGill pictured the result of this news if he gave it out; the stampede, the headlong rush that would bring men from every corner of the North. He saw this silent valley bared of its brooding forest and filled with people; he saw a log city in the flats down by the river; he heard the bass blasts of steamboats, the shrilling of saw-mills, the sound of music from dance-halls, the click of checks and roulette-balls, the noise of revelry—
"No! No! No!" He rose and shouted into the empty silence of his cabin. "I won't do it! I won't! I won't!"
But the voices called to him all through the night.
He rose early, for they would not let him rest, and during the darkness a terrible hunger had grown upon him. It was the hunger for companionship, for speech. His secret was too great for imprisonment, it threatened to burst the confines of the valley by its own tremendous force; he knew he could never sleep with it, for it would smother him; vampire-like, it would suck the life from his veins and the reason from his brain.
When he had eaten he pocketed the baking-powder tin, slipped into his snow-shoes and, crossing the gulch, climbed the westward hills that hid his neighbors. The dogs went with him.
II
News of the John Daniels strike reached Ophir in July, when a ragged, unkempt man arrived in a poling-boat. He was one of the party that had camped west of McGill, and he ate a raw potato with the ravenous appetite of an animal while waiting for his first meal at the Miner's Rest. Between mouthfuls he gave the word that set the town ablaze.
When he had bought a ton of grub at the A. C. store and weighed out payment in bright pumpkin-seed gold he went to Hopper's saloon and handed the proprietor a folded paper.