Grenfell smiled compassionately.

"I was Professor--but guess I've told you that already."

"The lead?" inquired the other man.

"Outcrop, a few yards of it. Then it dips on a slight inclination, and
evidently runs back toward the range. An easy drive for an adit.
Stayed there two days, Verneille and I. Quite sure about that gold."

Weston's face grew intent.

"You recorded it?"

"We staked a claim, and started back; but Verneille couldn't find a
deer, and when we first hit the valley provisions were running out.
There was a mist in the ranges, and whichever way we headed we brought
up on crags and precipices. Then we went up to look for another way
across and got into the snow. I never knew how I got out--or where
Verneille went, but when I struck a prospector's camp--he wasn't with
me."

The track-grader nodded. He had been born among the ranges, and knew
that the prospectors who went out on the gold trail did not invariably
come back. He had heard of famishing men staggering along astonishing
distances half-asleep or too dazed to notice where they were going. He
and Weston had done so themselves, for that matter.

"You told the prospector about the lead?" Weston inquired.

"If I did he never found the mine. I was scarcely sensible when I
reached his camp, and I lay there very ill until he went on and left
me with half a deer he'd shot. After that I nearly gave out again
making the settlements."

"Well," said the track-grader, "where's the lake?"

Grenfell spread out his hands.

"I don't know. I went up to look for it three or four times several
years ago."

He broke off abruptly, and there was silence for a minute or two.
Strange as the thing appeared, it was not altogether an unusual story.
All the way from California to the frozen north one now and then may
hear of men who struck a rich quartz or silver lead in the wilderness,
and, coming down to record it, signally failed to find it again. What
is stranger still, there are mines that have been discovered several
times by different men, none of whom was ever afterward able to
retrace his steps. At any rate, if one accomplished it, he never came
back to tell of his success, for the bones of many prospectors lie
unburied in the wilderness. Indeed, when the wanderers who know it
best gather for the time being in noisy construction camp or beside
the snapping fire where the new wagon road cleaves the silent bush,
they tell tales of lost quartz-reefs