"

The shovel was in the cache with one or two other prospector's tools,
which, as the reef they desired to find was uncovered in one place,
they had not thought it worth while to carry over that high ridge; so
they set to work in silence with the rifle butt and their naked hands.
Fortunately, the stones were large, and the soil beneath them soft,
and in about twenty minutes they were ready for the rest of their
task. It was one from which they shrank, but they accomplished it, and
Grenfell straightened himself wearily as they laid the last stone on
the little mound.

"It's all we can do, but I should feel considerably better if I could
get a hard drink now," he said.

Then he made a little forceful gesture.

"After all, he's well out of it. That man was white all through."

It was Verneille's only epitaph, pronounced most incongruously with
the same breath that expressed his comrade's longing for whisky, but
perhaps it was sufficient, for when one is called a white man it
implies a good deal in that country. Nobody, it seemed, knew where he
came from, or whether there was any one who belonged to him, but he
had done his work, and they had found him sitting high on the lonely
range to point the way. That might have been of no great service if it
were only treasure to which the gold trail led, but in the unclaimed
lands the prospector scouts a little ahead of the march of
civilization. After him come the axmen, the ploughmen and the
artisans, and orchards and mills and oatfields creep on a little
farther into the wilderness. Civilization has its incidental
drawbacks, but, in the west, at least, its advance provides those who
need them with new homes and food; and, when one comes to think of it,
in other respects it is usually the dead men who have pushed on in
advance who point the way.

A part only of the significance of that fact occurred to Grenfell when
the two men had plodded slowly on and left the little pile of stones
behind, and that was naturally the part applicable to his particular
case.

"This makes the thing quite certain," he said. "We're on the trail."

It was not astonishing that Weston had deduced as much already.

"Have you any idea where you separated?" he inquired.

"No," said Grenfell, wrinkling his forehead as though thinking hard.
"I've often tried to remember. As I told you, we started out from the
lake with scarcely any provisions left, and we couldn't find a deer. I
was played out a