The girl shook her head, and her eyes were troubled.
“I—I kind of wish you hadn’t,” she said gently.
“Euralian?” The man’s eyes widened. “It not matter nothing,” he said, with a shrug. “So I get him skin an’ him ivory for white boss, Kid. I kill all thing. Yes.”
The two men were standing on a gravel foreshore. It was the foreshore of a well-nigh dried out creek which in more abundant season was wont to flow turbulently into the greater stream of the Caribou. It was an almost hidden creek, for there existed no apparent inlet to the bigger river, except at such times as the spring freshet translated it into a surge of flood water. Now, in the late fall, there was scarcely water enough in its bed to do more than moisten the soles of a man’s moccasins, and, at the junction with Caribou, there was scarcely an indentation in the latter’s banks to mark its course.
But a mile and more to the north it was quite different. Here the creek was sharply marked between high, wide, barren shoulders that gave its course a breadth of something little less than a quarter of a mile. And its whole bed was a curious, copper-hued gravel which every gold man recognises as the precious “pay-dirt,” in pursuit of which he spends his life.
Bill Wilder and Chilcoot were moving slowly over this loose gravel gazing searchingly at the higher ground which enclosed the deepening cutting. For the moment they had no concern for the stuff they were treading under foot. They were looking for signs and landmarks which they had already learned by heart from minute descriptions.
With every furlong they explored the encompassing walls rose steadily higher, and grew ever more and more rugged. Their formation was rapidly changing. The rock walls were cut with sharp facets and riven in a hundred directions. There was no foliage anywhere. The cliffs were bald and not a yard of the wide pay-dirt bottom yielded a scrag of grass, or a single Arctic flower. It looked as if Nature had refused one atom of fertility to the soil in which she had chosen to bestow her treasure.
It was nearly noon when the explorers’ investigations were first interrupted. And the interruption came at a low headland where the whole course of the ravine swung away in an easterly direction, which looked to carry it in an exact parallel with the upper waters of the Caribou.
Chilcoot was on the lead at the bend and he came to a standstill, and flung out an arm pointing.