the nondescript fashion of old bushmen. Around his shoulders
were strung a compass, binoculars and map case, and at his belt dangled
a small ax and a prospector's hammer pick. He was torn, scratched, and
in a general way disheveled, but the clear glance of the black eyes and
the easy grace of his pose proclaimed him fit for action.

He stood for some time while his keen glance searched the country
ahead--a frozen sea in which congealed billows of rock thrust up their
tumbled heads in a gigantic confusion. Here and there were more
definite ridges that took a general trend, but for the most part it was
a chaos of rock and timber, slope and swamp, the refuse from the
construction of a more attractive country which had been assembled
elsewhere.

Presently Fisette took out his compass, balanced it in the palm of his
sinewy hand and glanced at the needle. As he glanced, this filament of
soft iron began to tremble and swing. He stood fascinated. Slowly at
first, but gradually with more active and jerky motions, the thing
became possessed. It vibrated as though in doubt, then moved off in
continued restlessness. Not by any means could Fisette end these
vagaries. After a little, a slow light grew in his eyes, his strong
face broadened into a smile and, snapping back the compass lid, he
strode down hill.

A quarter of an hour later he was chipping the edges of a ridge of
blackish-gray rock from which he had stripped great rolls of damp,
green moss. The rock lay exposed and glistening, its polished surface
scarred with the scratches of hard stones that once lay embedded in the
feet of prehistoric glaciers, but Fisette, screwing his bushy brows
over a tiny magnifying glass and peering at the sparkling fragments in
his palm and balancing their weight, cared nothing for glaciers. He
only knew he had found that which he had been seeking for more than a
year.

There is no measuring device for joy, and no foot-rule one can lay on
emotion, but it is questionable if to the heart of any man comes
greater lightness than to that of the one who by stress and endurance
in the wilderness, upturns the treasure he has so arduously sought.
These moments are few and rapt and precious, and they glowed in the
slow brain of the half-breed Fisette as nothing else had ever glowed.
It was true that he stood to do well and earn independence out of this
discovery, but he was conscious at the instant of a reward greater than
ease and comfor