Turner clapped his hand to the breast pocket of his coat.
“Wait, Mac! I must have left my fountain pen where the tent was. I’ll go back after it.”
“Take you half an hour,” demurred McAdams, squinting at the rising sun. “We got some job getting outer this part of the world—on half rations.”
“Got to have the pen, you know!” Turner walked briskly away.
The little black tube was nowhere to be found among the tramped boughs that marked the site of the tent. Suddenly Turner remembered that he had used the pen last in making a decorative box around the epitaph. At the grave he found the pen—and also something else. The risen sun drew glintings from the fresh-turned gravel. He was amazed. He dug about with his fingers. A little nugget; a larger one; specks of fine gold and coarse. He ran down the creek and found an impatient McAdams feeding choice bits of bunch grass to the gaunt mules.
“Most wonderful thing! Where we camped last night——”
“Well, by heck! what d’ye know about that?” exclaimed McAdams, when the mining engineer had told him. The “pardner” of unlucky Enoch Whipple forgot about half rations, for the time being, and turned the mules back. In ten minutes the two prospectors were sizing up the vicinity of the last resting place of the old Montana scout.
The result was amazing—and disappointing. McAdams, in the dark, had come upon the only deposit of gravel. It was a pothole shielded by the angular, overhanging rim rock of the creek channel from the denuding forces of erosion that elsewhere had swept the highlands clean of all its old deposits. It had been known as a “pockety” country, as old Whipple had told them. Hereabouts there was one pocket. All that was mortal of Enoch Whipple rested there. The mining engineer and the old sour dough returned to the gold-flecked grave.
Alfred Lawrence Turner’s mouth twitched. He lit one of the last of his cigarettes.
“We won’t find as easy a place for a new grave,” he remarked thoughtfully. “But we’ll not need a new one. After we’ve washed the gravel—cleaned out this pothole completely—why, we can reinter the body and cover it with the tailings. Make it look just as it did——”