short. It took me five years to see the thing. I heard it first an' nearly killed a man for tellin' me what I thought a damned lie. But it was true. I got back to find her gone, little Madge gone, Lowe gone, and the camp lookin' at me with what didn't strike me altogether as pity. I seemed to hear 'em talking about December and May, an' I couldn't stand it. I traced 'em for a while until I l'arned they'd gone to California. W'en I had enough to git thar, they was gone.
"So you see, in killin' him, I spoiled my chances of findin' them. If he hadn't grown tired of her or, mebbe, bin unfaithful, an' she left him. Twelve years ago, an' little Madge now nearin' seventeen. I want you boys to look about for her if she's near here. If she—if they—ain't, I want you to find 'em. Open the bag, Stone, an' dump out the ore where I can get at it."
Lyman fumbled with the specimens, seeming to judge them by feel and weight. Five or six of the fragments he handed to them. They were milky quartz, white and crisp as sugar, veined and pocked with yellow gold. It needed no expert to tell that here was the aurum purum, the genuine metal.
"Looks like 'blow-out' stuff," said Healy, scratching at the gold with his nail as if he would pick it loose.
"It's no blow-out," said Lyman. "There's a great wall of it, reaching way up into the blackness. The torch brought out the gold, like stars in the Milky Way. It is the mother-lode, I tell you. The
