“Wh—when?”
“To-morrow.”
“Oh, all right.”
“To-morrow. Will you drive out to my diggin’s? I’m going out early. Been thawing frozen ground all day. Stuff it with dry moss. Won’t freeze, not much. To-morrow—well, it’s my big moment.”
“I—I’ll come.” Her voice was hoarse with suppressed emotion. She had caught it from him.
“Be there at nine.”
“At nine,” she repeated after him. Then he was gone.
She slept badly that night. Sometimes she fancied she heard a voice saying, “You find gold? Mebby yes. Mebby no.” At other times she thought of her companions. She had not quite forgotten that all their efforts to find gold, silver, radium were guided by films that rightly belonged to another. No longer could she believe that one of these men had committed the theft. She thought of Lloyd Hill’s faultless world war record. She recalled the time Jim had saved her dogs, and that night he had talked so earnestly of religion. Most vivid of all was the memory of that hour when her father’s life had hung in the balance and Clyde Hawke had snatched him from the grave.
“They couldn’t have done it!” she told herself stoutly. “And yet—”
She woke from a period of belated slumber just in time to swallow a cup of steaming coffee, hitch her dogs and go speeding away across the snow.