“Here,” she said to Greta as her feet touched the shores of the camping ground on Duncan’s Bay, “here we shall camp for the night. Tomorrow we will go on. I mean to do a little digging.”
“For gold?” Greta stared.
“For a barrel of gold.” Florence smiled. “Well, anyway, for something.”
Dragging a small trench spade from her pack, she studied the lay of the land.
“Now where would one make camp?” she said thoughtfully as her keen eyes surveyed the narrow patch of ground. “Not too far back. Campfire might be blown into the forest and set the hillside blazing. Not too close to the shore either. Wind might come up and drive the waves over you while you slept.
“About here.” She set her spade at the very center of the level stretch of ground that in all is not larger than one city lot.
“You know, Greta,” she said thoughtfully as she began to dig, “it really doesn’t matter whether we find a barrel of gold. Very often people are harmed by having too much money. It’s good for us to work. There are ways of getting things we need—good stout clothes, plain food, and all the education that’s good for us, if we are wise and really work hard.
“We may find gold. No one could be sure we will not. We may find charcoal and scorched bones. If we study these carefully we can say, ‘This fire was kindled two hundred years ago, before ever white men set foot on these shores.’ We will be adding a sentence or two to Isle Royale’s strange history. That’s something.
“And we might—” she was digging now, cutting away the thin sod, then tossing out shovelfuls of sandy soil. “We might possibly find some copper instruments crudely made by the Indians.
“That—” she stood erect for a moment. “That would be a great deal. Any museum would pay well for those. Some may have been found on the island, but I doubt it. But it is known that the Indians came here from the mainland to take chunks of solid copper from the rocks.