“ARE you satisfied, Len? Does it make you feel good?”
McLagan was observing the dark, mobile features of the younger man. They were alight with the look he knew so well. It was the expression he had seen time and again in those men of Beacon whose whole horizon was bounded by gold and all it meant in their lives. It was a similar expression to that which had played in Len Stern’s features at that time when his strong fingers had raked through the heaping gold dust spread out before him at the far-off camp on the Australian coast.
McLagan was more than interested. For the man was gazing upon the goodly pile of smallish canvas bags lying on the earthen floor against the log wall of the hut overlooking the mouth of the Alsek River. At that moment humanity was uppermost in the engineer. A goodly satisfaction was stirring in his heart. And his manner had lost much of that roughness which was so characteristic of him.
Len nodded, his eyes remaining fascinated by the thing they were gazing upon.
“That don’t begin to say the thing I feel,” he said awkwardly. He raised a strong, sunburnt hand and passed it back over his forehead. Then he laughed. It was a short, jerky laugh that was an expression of some feeling he had no words for. “Do you know how a shipwrecked feller ’ud feel when his feet find solid earth again?” He shook his head. “That’s how those darn bags of dust make me feel. That, an’ something else. Yes, I feel I want to say all sorts of stuff how I think of you. But I can’t.”
McLagan brushed aside the man’s desire to express his gratitude.
“But you weren’t—shipwrecked?” he said quickly.
The other’s reply came with a laugh.
“It cost me all but my last thousand dollars to answer that message you sent out, and—get around.”
“But you were on a big strike? You and poor Jim?”