In the meantime Lloyd Hill had climbed from his hole beneath the frozen crust of earth to stare at his slender companion, Joyce Mills, in genuine dismay.
“That is no task for a girl!” he exclaimed. “I was too eager. I—I wanted to share it with you!”
Truly the girl’s appearance would never have done in a parlor setting. She had thrown off her fur parka. Her heavy wool dress was smeared from waist to hem with sandy mud. Her moccasins were a wreck. Her hands were red and blistered. She had been turning the windlass and dumping pay-dirt for three solid hours.
“No! No!” she protested gamely. “Why, it has been marvelous! I—I wouldn’t have missed it for anything. Truly I wouldn’t!”
“Well, then,” replied Lloyd, in a calmer voice, “now that the worst is over, I suggest that you put on your parka and prepare to rock this thing back and forth for an hour while we pan our pay-dirt and see how much gold we really have.”
“There is some,” she replied excitedly as her head disappeared inside her parka. “I saw it gleaming among the pebbles.”
“Oh, yes, there is some.”
* * * * * * * *
Strange as it may seem, at this moment Scott Ramsey, in that other prospector’s camp seventy miles away, was bursting through the door with a shout:
“They’ve found it! Gold!”