Next evening, as they lay before a roaring campfire, chins propped on elbows, watching, dreaming, half asleep, the two of them, the boy and girl, they heard the old man stirring in his sleep. Of a sudden he sat up. By his staring eyes they knew that he spoke as one in a dream.
“I told him the things were copper.” His voice was pitched and strained. “But Timmie said ‘No, they are green gold.’ And he must have been right, for he had worked with a silversmith and had helped make alloys.
“He said they were copper, gold and silver, melted together.
“I said the natives had melted them together.
“He said ‘No, they’re too ignorant for that. God and nature made the alloy. Somewhere in a great caldron of a volcano, long ago when the earth was new, gold, silver and copper were melted together and poured away in a stream of green gold. And somewhere in the hills there is a placer mine of green gold. We’ll find it.’
“Timmie said that, and he’s back there behind the hills waiting still, and he knows where the mine is. I’ve dreamed that many times, and it’s true.”
Johnny’s lips were open for a question, but the girl held up a hand for silence.
“The day has been hard,” she whispered. “He is half asleep. Don’t excite him.”
A moment later the old man had dropped to his place deep among the blankets and save for the crackling of the fire silence lay upon hills and tundra.