held it in his fingers, while he bent his face close to the pan, his
eyes two gimlets boring into the contents.

He got up stiffly, backed, and sat down upon the low bank with his feet
far apart and his shoulders bent, while he stared at the little bit of
mineral in his fingers.

"Coarse gold, and not such a hell of a lot," he pronounced to himself
with careful impartiality. "But it's pay dirt, and if there's enough
of it, it'll help a lot at this end of the cow business." He sat there
a long time, thinking and planning and holding himself sternly to cold
reality, rejecting every possibility that had the slightest symptom of
being an air-castle. He did not intend to let this thing turn his head
or betray him into any foolishness whatsoever. He was going to look at
the thing cold-bloodedly and put his imagination in cold storage for
the present.

His first impulse--to ride straight to the Wolverine and show Billy
Louise these three tiny nuggets--he rejected as a bit of foolishness.
He was perfectly willing to trust Billy Louise with any secret he
possessed, but he knew that he would be feeding her imagination with
dangerous fuel. She would begin dreaming and building castles and
prospecting for herself, very likely; and that trail led oftenest to
black disappointment. If he made good, he would tell her--when he told
her something else. And if the whole thing were just a fluke, a stray
deposit of a little gold that did not amount to anything, then it would
be best for her to know nothing about it. Ward felt in himself, at
that moment, the keen foretaste of bitter disappointment which would
follow such a certainty. He did not want Billy Louise exposed to that
pain.

He would tell her about the wolves, of course. It was pretty hard not
to tell her everything that concerned himself, but the streak of native
reticence in his nature had been strengthened by the vicissitudes of
the life he had lived. While Billy Louise had found the sole weak
point which made that reticence scarcely a barrier to full confidence,
still he knew that he would keep this from her if he made up his mind
to it.

He would not tell anybody. He raised his head and looked at the hills
where his cattle would feed, and pictured it cluttered with
gold-hunters, greedy, undesirable interlopers doomed to disappointment
in the long run. Ward had seen the gold fever sweep through a
community and spoil life for the weak ones who took to chasing