“There,” said Harry, “I feel better. Pity we did not have the rifle along. We could have had the two others. However, they’re up there somewhere and will do for another meal. Wonder what these fellows find to eat.”
He picked up the crop of the ptarmigan and opened it with his knife. “Buds, bugs, and gravel,” he said. “Not a very tempting diet, but we may have to come to it ourselves. Hello, what’s this?”
In the gravel in the bird’s crop were three or four pebbles, not much larger than grains of rice, but flattened and yellow. They examined these with growing excitement.
“It’s gold!” exclaimed Harry. “It’s gold! we’ve been prospecting in the wrong places.”
“I should say we had,” said Joe, giggling somewhat hysterically; “but we can’t kill ptarmigans enough to make a gold mine.”
“No, no,” cried Harry, too much in earnest to appreciate a joke. “It’s the clay bottom. The birds picked up the nuggets there. Gold sinks through sand in the stream just as it does in the pan. We should have gone down to ‘bed rock,’ as the miners say. There’s where it is. Come on back!”
The sun had swung low to set behind the northern cliffs, and it lacked but two hours of midnight. But there would be no darkness in that latitude in late June, and forgetting fatigue, they hurried back to the spot which they now called Ptarmigan Bend. Here a bed of stiff clay seemed to underlie the bed of the stream, leading down to a mica-schist ledge over which the waters rippled as if from an artificial pond.
From the edge of this little lagoon they scraped sand and pebbles, getting well down into the clay with the now frayed and worn paddle. The clay flowed from the pan in a muddy stream, the sand easily followed, and they scraped out the larger gravel with care, panning the sand beneath it again. Then they set down the pan and shook hands with each other once more.
In the bottom of the pan were a dozen of the flat nuggets such as had been in the ptarmigan’s crop, and one large one, the size of a large bean! They were on bed rock surely, and the gold that had tantalized them for a time seemed about to yield itself up in quantity.