“Bitch?”

“Haven’t you got a condensed milk can with some bacon grease in it, and a rag wick?  Makes a good enough light.”

But the fire had been poked up, and the cabin was full of dancing lights and shadows.  Besides that, the Boy was holding a resinous stick alight over the table, and they all bent down as before.

“It was passin’ a bank in ‘Frisco wid a windy full o’ that stuff that brought me up here,” said O’Flynn.

“It was hearin’ about that winder brought me” added Potts.

Everyone longed to touch and feel about in the glittering pile, but no one as yet had dared to lay a finger on the smallest grain in the hoard.  An electrical shock flashed through the company when the General picked up one of the biggest nuggets and threw it down with a rich, full-bodied thud.  “That one is four ounces.”

He took up another.

“This is worth about sixty dollars.”

“More like forty,” said Dillon.

They were of every conceivable shape and shapelessness, most of them flattened; some of them, the greenhorn would swear, were fashioned by man into roughly embossed hearts, or shells, or polished discs like rude, defaced coins.  One was a perfect staple, another the letter “L,” another like an axe-head, and one like a peasant’s sabot.  Some were almost black with iron stains, and some were set with “jewels” of quartz, but for the most part they were formless fragments of a rich and brassy yellow.

“Lots of the little fellas are like melon-seeds”; and the Boy pointed a shaking finger, longing and still not daring to touch the treasure.

Each man had a dim feeling in the back of his head that, after all, the hillock of gold was an illusion, and his own hand upon the dazzling pile would clutch the empty air.

“Where’s your dust?” asked the Boy.

Dillon stared.

“Why, here.”

“This is all nuggets and grains.”

“Well, what more do you want?”

“Oh, it’d do well enough for me, but it ain’t dust.”

“It’s what we call dust.”

“As coarse as this?”

The Sour-dough nodded, and Lighter laughed.

“There’s a fox’s mask,” said the Colonel at the bottom of the table, pointing a triangular bit out.

“Let me look at it a minute,” begged the Boy.

“Hand it round,” whispered Schiff.

It was real.  It was gold.  Their fingers tingled under the first contact.  This was the beginning.

The rude bit of metal bred a glorious confidence.  Under the magic of its touch Robert Bruce’s expensive education became a simple certainty.  In Potts’s hand the nugget gave birth to a mighty progeny.  He saw himself pouring out sackfuls before his enraptured girl.

The Boy lifted his flaring torch with a victorious sense of having just bought back the Orange Grove; and Salmon P. passed the nugget to his partner with a blissful sigh.