“Sure. The biggest in the world—on a fever-racked coast that I don’t guess I’ll ever get near to again. The fever got me. I only got away by the scruff of my neck. And the stuff I took out did little more than satisfy the dope merchants of Perth who did their best for me. I guess I was shipwrecked both ways. Physical and financial. Man, you’ve done an almighty glad thing.”
McLagan sat himself on the cabin trunk just behind him, and Len Stern flung himself into the chair which usually stood against the table where McLagan was accustomed to work. The small wood stove, radiating a pleasant warmth in the chill of the late summer air, stood between them. And Len Stern mechanically held out the palms of his hands to it.
There was physical weariness in him. It was the same with the hard-driving engineer. The voiceless waste of desolate muskeg with its surface of shaking tundra lay far behind them now. So with the wearisome portage to the Alsek River meandering through its coal-laden, oil-soaked territory of hills. The gateway to the ocean had been reached and passed only that morning. And now they had gained the shelter of McLagan’s home overlooking the bay, ready for the last stage of that effort which had been crowded into days that should have been weeks.
It had all been a whirlwind rush from the moment of Stern’s landing until this return to McLagan’s home. Stern was the least weary of the two. But then he and Sasa Mannik had had the blessed break of a day’s complete rest up at McLagan’s oil camp, while the engineer endured an added gruelling in the work that was his. He had spent the time with Peter Loby in completing preparations for the time when the men of finance behind him should arrive to set the seal of their approval upon his achievements. It had meant a swift change of effort for him from that which had been an expression of a man’s deepest emotions to the sheerly mental aspect of those affairs which represented the material side of his life.
They had eaten the midday meal with which Sasa Mannik’s indifferent skill had provided them. And the whole place was a-litter with books, charts, papers, and clothing, hopelessly mixed up with the utensils of the meal of which they had just partaken. They were in the midst of the preparations for McLagan’s final quittance, which was to take place that day. It was a portentous operation regarded without optimism by the engineer. And Len Stern, while ready and willing, found himself of little service.
McLagan lit one of his long, lean cigars, glad enough to abandon his labours for a few minutes. Stern lit and drearily sucked his charred old briar. The contemplation of those bags of gold dust, that never in his most fantastic dreams had he hoped to see again, had warmed his heart and eased the strain he had laboured under.
It was all very amazing, and McLagan himself was the most amazing thing of it all. It was all mystifying, too. And as he sat luxuriating in the reek of his pipe the man from Australia found himself marvelling at the mystery in the midst of which he had found himself so suddenly plunged.
He knew now that McLagan had been responsible for the message Goodchurch had sent out. Even its enticing wording. At the time he had read it in the local news sheet in Perth he had not seriously considered it beyond the reply he must make. Then had come his arrival at the coast on the tubby mail boat on its way to Seward. Then his meeting with McLagan, and his instant whirling off on a breathless rush that was only just about to terminate. He had been asked very little and told less. McLagan had relied on visual rather than verbal demonstration. He had seen the Imperial again after believing the vessel to be fathoms deep at the bottom of the ocean. He had gazed upon some weird, supernatural demonstration upon her deck. He had been hurried off to help in the capture of the man who had murdered his partner, and robbed them of the fruits of their labours. The capture had been achieved and a confession extracted. Then he had been called upon to agree to the murderer’s release. True, he had the assurance of McLagan that the murderer would not, could not escape. But——
And now he was sitting in McLagan’s home gazing on the wealth of gold dust that he and poor Jim Carver had washed out on the fever-laden coast of Australia. It had come back to him. And McLagan was the man who had recovered it. How? How? How had it all been achieved? How had McLagan discovered in the Limpet of Boston the foul tragedy of his friend’s death, and recovered for him the gold that had been stolen? The mystery of it all; McLagan’s refusal to enlighten him; these things were utterly confounding. In his own phraseology he felt the whole thing was just “one darn mystery after another” and he wanted to fling up his hands in complete helplessness.
But there was no outward expression of these feelings. He sat gladly regarding that small, comforting pile of wealth which McLagan had told him was his.