All eyes were on Big Bill. The girls sat voicelessly waiting, and the smiles on their faces were fixed with the intensity of the feeling behind them. Clarence, like Perse, had stood up in his agitation, and both boys gazed wide-eyed as the tall figure leapt to its feet and passed back to the low “A” tent, which was his quarters.
While he was gone Chilcoot strove to fill in the interval with appropriate comment.
“Yes,” he said, “Caribou’s chock full of the dust, an’—”
But no one was listening. Four pair of eyes were gazing after Big Bill, four hearts were hammering in four youthful bosoms under stress of feelings which in all human life the magic of gold never fails to arouse. It was the same with these simple creatures, who had never known a sight of gold, as it was with the most hardened labourer of the gold trail. Everything but the prize these men had won was forgotten in that thrilling moment.
Wilder came back almost at once. He was bearing a riffled pan, one of those primitive manufactures which is so great a thing in the life of the man who worships at the golden shrine. He was bearing it in both hands as though its contents were weighty. And as he came, the Kid, no less eagerly than the others, hurriedly dashed to his side to peer at the thing he was carrying.
But the pan was covered with bagging. And the man smilingly denied them all.
“Get right along back,” he laughed. “Sit around and I’ll show you.” Then his eyes gazed down into the Kid’s upturned face, and he realised her moment of sheer excitement had passed and something else was stirring behind the pretty eyes that had come to mean so much to him. He nodded.
“Don’t be worried, Kid,” he said quietly. “Maybe I guess the thing that’s troubling. I’m going to fix that, the same as I reckon to fix anything else that’s going to make you feel bad.”
The girl made no reply. In her mind the shadow of Usak had arisen. And even to her, in the circumstances, it was a threatening shadow. She remembered the thing the savage had said to her in his violent protest. “Him mans your enemy. Him come steal all thing what are yours. Him river. Him land. Him—gold.” There was nothing in her thought that this man was stealing from her. Such a thing could never have entered her mind. It was the culminating threat of the savage that had robbed her of her delight, and made the thing in the pan almost hateful to her. Usak had deliberately threatened the life of this man, and the full force of that threat, hitherto almost disregarded, now overwhelmed her with a terror such as she had never known before.
She was the last to take her place on the spread of skins before the fire. The others were crowding round the man with the pan. But he kept them waiting till the girl had taken her place beside him. Then, and not till then, without a word he squatted on the rugs and slowly withdrew the bagging.