, and brought a second armful.

"There's three more in that last cabin," he explained. "Two men, an' a
woman. She must ha' been the wife of the man they killed. They were the
last to live, an' they starved to death. An' now, Johnny----"

He paused, and he drew in a great breath.

He was looking to the west, where the sun was beginning to sink behind the
mountains.

"An' now, Johnny, if you're ready, an' if Joanne is ready, we'll go," he
said.

CHAPTER XXVII

As they went up out of the basin into the broad meadows of the larger
valley, MacDonald rode between Aldous and Joanne, and the pack-horses, led
by Pinto, trailed behind.

Again old Donald said, as he searched the valley:

"We've beat 'em, Johnny. Quade an' Rann are coming up on the other side of
the range, and I figger they're just about a day behind--mebby only hours,
or an hour. You can't tell. There's more gold back there. We got about a
hunderd pounds in them fifteen sacks, an' there was twice that much. It's
hid somewhere. Calkins used to keep his'n under the floor. So did Watts.
We'll find it later. An' the river, an' the dry gulches on both sides of
the valley--they're full of it! It's all gold, Johnny--gold everywhere!"

He pointed ahead to where the valley rose in a green slope between two
mountains half a mile away.

"That's the break," he said. "It don't seem very far now, do it, Joanne?"
His silence seemed to have dropped from him like a mantle, and there was
joy in what he was telling. "But it was a distance that night--a tumble
distance," he continued, before she could answer. "That was forty-one years
ago, coming November. An' it was cold, an' the snow was deep. It was bitter
cold--so cold it caught my Jane's lungs, an' that was what made her go a
little later. The slope up there don't look steep now, but it was steep
then--with two feet of snow to drag ourselves through. I don't think the
cavern is more'n five or six miles away, Johnny, mebby less, an' it took us
twenty hours to reach it. It snowed so heavy that night, an' the wind
blowed so, that our trail was filled up or they might ha' followed."

Many times Aldous had been on the point of asking old Donald a question.
For the first time he asked it now, even as his eyes swept slowly and
searchingly over the valley for signs of Mortimer FitzHugh and Quade.

"I've often wondered why you ran away with Jane," he said. "I know what
threatened her--a thing worse than death. But wh