But neither cold nor fatigue could keep us away from the shaft and the drift. We had gone down to bed-rock, and were tunnelling in to meet the hole the Halfbreed had covered up. So far we had found nothing. Every day we panned samples of the dirt, always getting colours, sometimes a fifty-cent pan, but never what we dreamed of, hoped for.

"Wait, boys, till we get a two-hundred-dollar pan, then we'll begin to whoop it up some."

Once the Company Manager came down on a dog-team. He looked over our shaft. He wore a coon coat, with a cap of beaver, and huge fur mits hung by a cord around his neck. He was massive and impassive. Spiky icicles bristled around his mouth.

"What luck, boys?" His breath came like steam.

"None, so far," we told him, wearily, and off he went into the frozen gloom, saying he hoped we would strike it before long.

"Wait a while."

We were working two men to a shaft, burning our ground over night. The Prodigal and I manned the windlasses, while the old miners went down the drifts. It was a cold, cold job standing there on that rugged platform turning the windlass-crank. Long before it was fairly light we got to our posts, and lowered our men into the hole. The air was warmer down there; but the work was harder, more difficult, more dangerous.

At noon there was no sunshine, only a wan, ashen light that suffused the sky. A deathlike stillness lay on the valley, not a quiver or movement in leaf or blade. The snow was a shroud, smooth save where the funereal pines pricked through. In that intensity of cold, that shivering agony of desolation, it seemed as if nature was laughing at us--the Cosmic Laugh.

Our meals were hurriedly cooked and bolted. We grudged every moment of our respite from toil. At night we often were far too weary to undress.

We lost our regard for cleanliness; we neglected ourselves. Always we talked of the result of the day's panning and the chances of to-morrow.

Surely we would strike it soon.

"Wait awhile."

Colder it grew and colder. Our kerosene flowed like mush. The water froze solid in our kettle. Our bread was full of icy particles.

Everything had to be thawed out continually. It was tiresome, exasperating, when we were in such a devil of a hurry. It kept us back; it angered us, this pest of a cold. Our tempers began to suffer. We were short, taciturn. The strain was beginning to tell on us.

"Wait awhile."

Then, one afternoon, the Something happened. It was Jim who was the chosen one. About three o'clock he signalled to be hoisted up, and when he appeared he was carrying a pan of dirt. "Call the others," he said.

All together in the little cabin we stood round, while Jim washed out the pan in snow-water melt over our stove. I will never forget how eagerly we watched the gravel, and the whirling, dexterous movements of the old man. We could see gleams of yellow in the muddy water. Thrills of joy and hope went through us. We had got the thing, the big thing, at last.

"Hurry, Jim," I said, "or I'll die of suspense."

Patiently he went on. There it was at last in the bottom of the pan--sweeter to our eyes than to a woman the sight of her first-born.

There it lay, glittering, gleaming gold, fine gold, coarse gold, nuggety gold.

"Now, boys, you can whoop it up," said Jim quietly; "for there's many and many a pan like it down there in the drift."

But never a whoop. What was the matter with us? When the fortune we had longed for so eagerly came at last, we did not greet it even with a cheer. Oh, we were painfully silent.

Solemnly we shook hands all round.

CHAPTER XVIII

"Now to weigh it," said the Prodigal.

On the tiny pair of scales we turned it out--ninety-five dollars' worth.

Well, it was a good start, and we were all possessed with a frantic eagerness to go down in the drift. I crawled along the tunnel. There, in the face of it, I could see the gold shining, and the longer I looked the more I seemed to see. It was rich, rich. I picked out and burnished a nugget as large as a filbert. There were lots of others like it. It was a strike. The question was: how much was there of it? The Halfbreed soon settled our doubts on that score.

"It stands to reason the pay runs between where I first found it and where we've struck it now. That alone means a tidy stake for each of us.

Say, boys, if you were to cover all that distance with twenty-dollar gold pieces six feet wide, and packed edge to edge, I wouldn't take them for our interest in that bit of ground. I see a fine big ranch in Manitoba for my share; ay, and hired help to run it. The only thing that sticks in my gullet is that fifty per cent. to the Company."

"Well, we can't kick," I said; "we'd never have got the lay if they'd had a hunch. My! won't they be sore?"

Sure enough, in a few days the news leaked out, and the Manager came post-haste.

"Hear you've struck it rich, boys."

"So rich that I guess we'll have to pack down gravel from the benches to mix in before we can sluice it," said the Prodigal.

"You don't say. Well, I'll have to have a man on the ground to look after our interests."

"All right. It means a good thing for you."

"Yes, but it would have meant a better if we had worked it ourselves.

However, you boys deserve your luck. Hello, the devil----"

He turned round and saw the Halfbreed. He gave a long whistle and went away, looking pensive.

It was the night of the discovery when the Prodigal made us an address.

"Look here, boys; do you know what this means? It means victory; it means freedom, happiness, the things we want, the life we love. To me it means travel, New York, Paris, evening dress, the opera. To McCrimmon here it means his farm. To each according to his notion, it means the 'Things That Matter.'

"Now, we've just begun. The hardest part is to come, is to get out the fortune that's right under our feet. We're going to get every cent of it, boys. There's a little over three months to do it in, leaving about a month to make sluice-boxes and clean up the dirt. We've got to work like men at a burning barn. We've worked hard, but we've got to go some yet. For my part, I'm willing to do stunts that will make my previous record look like a plugged dime. I guess you boys all feel the same way."

"You bet we do."

"Well, nuf sed; let's get busy."

So, once more, with redoubled energy, we resumed our tense, unremitting round of toil. Now, however, it was vastly different. Every bucket of dirt meant money in our pockets, every stroke of the pick a dollar. Not that it was all like the first rich pocket we had struck. It proved a most erratic and puzzling paystreak--one day rich beyond our dreams, another too poor to pay for the panning. We swung on a pendulum of hope and despair. Perhaps this made it all the more exciting, and stimulated us unnaturally, and always we cursed that primitive method of mining that made every bucket of dirt the net result of infinite labor.

Every day our two dumps increased in size (for we had struck pay on the other shaft), and every day our assurance and elation increased correspondingly. It was bruited around that we had one of the richest bits of ground in the country, and many came to gaze at us. It used to lighten my labours at the windlass to see their looks of envy and to hear their awe-stricken remarks.

"That's one of them," they would say; "one of the lucky four, the lucky laymen."

So, as the facts, grossly exaggerated, got noised abroad, they came to call us the "Lucky Laymen."

Looking back, there will always seem to me something weird and incomprehensible in those twilight days, an unreality, a vagueness like some dreary, feverish dream. For three months I did not see my face in a mirror. Not that I wanted to, but I mention this just to show how little we thought of ourselves.

In like manner, never did I have a moment's time to regard my inner self in the mirror of consciousness. No mental analysis now; no long hours of retrospection, no tete-a-tete interviews with my soul. At times I felt as if I had lost my identity. I was a slave of the genie Gold, releasing it from its prison in the frozen bowels of the earth. I was an automaton turning a crank in the frozen stillness of the long, long night.

It was a life despotically objective, and now, as I look back, it seems as if I had never lived it at all. I seem to look down a long, dark funnel and see a little machine-man bearing my semblance, patiently, steadily, wearily turning the handle of a windlass in the clear, lancinating cold of those sombre, silent days.