“He has come upon something,” she said after a moment of silence, “from out his past.” She turned to nod at the rude brush shelter beneath which, deep in his sleeping bag, the old man slumbered. Worn out by excitement and his sudden heart attack, he had yielded to his granddaughter’s entreaties, and retired early.
As for the girl and the boy, nothing was further from their thought than sleep. They had come to a valley of decision. This they knew.
“He will go,” the girl said, glancing again at the sleeping one. “That trail has to do with his past. More than twenty years ago, with a partner called Timmie, he went into these mountains prospecting. I know little enough about it. What I know my mother told me. She’s dead now; been dead eight years. He is all I have, and I am his only grandchild.”
Once more, save for the little circle of light sent out by the campfire, all was darkness. Save for the snap and crack of burning logs, all was silence.
A light wind stirred the branches of the giant pine beneath which they had camped. As if endeavoring to tell the secret of the hunting knife buried deep in its heart, it sighed and whispered with the breeze.
“He came back once, my mother told me,” the girl went on at last. “It was a whole year later. Someone found him wandering in the forest. He was snow-blind and delirious. In the long weeks of sickness that followed he babbled of Timmie, of a mine of green gold, and of a knife driven into a tree.
“That,” she said, pointing to the giant pine, “is the tree. It must be. And that is the knife.”
“But what of Timmie? What of green gold?” Johnny’s voice was low.
“I don’t know. I only know,” she said slowly, “that he will go all the way over that long, long trail. It is his last great adventure. He may not live to complete it. There is his heart. He may—”
She became silent. Cupping her chin in her hands, she stared at the fire.