“Tell me of it again, Sate,” he went on, knocking out the red clay pipe he had been smoking, and re-filling it from a beaded buckskin pouch.
But the youth was impatient, and the quick flash of his black eyes was full of scorn for the unruffled composure of the other.
“He’s beaten us, father,” he cried. “He has it. I have seen.” He spread out his hands in an expressive gesture. And they were lean, delicate hands that were almost womanish. “This priest-man with his say-so of religion. He search all the time. It is the only thing he think of. Gold! Well, he get it.”
He finished up with a laugh that only expressed fierce chagrin.
“And he get it here on this Loon Creek, that you make us waste three months’ search on, son?”
The father shook his head. And his eyes were cold, and the whole expression of his set features mask-like. The youth flung out his hands.
“I go down for trade to Fort Cupar. This missionary, Marty Le Gros, is there. He show this thing. Two great nuggets, clear yellow gold. Big? They must be one hundred ounces each. No. Much more. And he tell the story to McLeod, who drinks so much, that he find them on Loon Creek. I hear him tell. I listen all the time. They don’t know me. They think I am a fool Eskimo. I let them think. Well? Where is it on Loon Creek? We go up. We come down. There is no sign anywhere. No work. The man lies, for all his religion. Or we are the fools we do not think we are.”
Sate turned his searching eyes on the northern distance, where the broad stream merged itself into the purple of low, far-off hills.
It was a scene common enough to the lower lands of Canada’s extreme north. There was nothing of barren desolation. There were no great hills, no great primordial forests along the broad valley of Loon Creek. But it was a widespread park land of woodland bluffs of hardy conifers dotting a brilliant-hued carpet of myriads of Arctic flowers, and long sun-forced grasses, and lichens of every shade of green. It was Nature’s own secret flower garden, far out of the common human track, where, throughout the ages, she had spent her efforts in enriching the soil, till, under an almost tropical summer heat, it yielded a display of vivid colour such as could never have been matched in any wilderness under southern skies.
The older man observed him keenly.