they roamed the mountains hand in hand in their hunts; how she was comrade and chum when he went prospecting.  He has opened his lonely old heart to me—­a great deal.  He’s told me how they used to be alone for months at a time in the mountains, the things they used to do, and how she would sing for him beside their campfire at night.  ’She had a voice sweet as an angel,’ I remember he told me once.  Then, more than forty years ago, came the gold-rush away up in the Stikine River country.  They went.  They joined a little party of twelve—­ten men and two women.  This party wandered far out of the beaten paths of the other gold-seekers.  And at last they found gold.”

Ahead of them Donald MacDonald had turned in his saddle and was looking back.  For a moment Aldous ceased speaking.

“Please—­go on!” said Joanne.

“They found gold,” repeated Aldous.  “They found so much of it, Ladygray, that some of them went mad—­mad as beasts.  It was placer gold—­loose gold, and MacDonald says that one day he and Jane filled their pockets with nuggets.  Then something happened.  A great storm came; a storm that filled the mountains with snow through which no living creature as heavy as a man or a horse could make its way.  It came a month earlier than they had expected, and from the beginning they were doomed.  Their supplies were almost gone.

“I can’t tell you the horrors of the weeks and months that followed, as old Donald has told them to me, Joanne.  You must imagine.  Only, when you are deep in the mountains, and the snow comes, you are like a rat in a trap.  So they were caught—­eleven men and three women.  They who could make their beds in sheets of yellow gold, but who had no food.  The horses were lost in the storm.  Two of their frozen carcasses were found and used for food.  Two of the men set out on snowshoes, leaving their gold behind, and probably died.

“Then the first terrible thing happened.  Two men quarrelled over a can of beans, and one was killed.  He was the husband of one of the women.  The next terrible thing happened to her—­and there was a fight.  On one side there were young Donald and the husband of the other woman; on the other side—­the beasts.  The husband was killed, and Donald and Jane sought refuge in the log cabin they had built.  That night they fled, taking what little food they possessed, and what blankets they could carry.  They knew they were facing death.  But they went together, hand in hand.

“At last Donald found a great cave in the side of a mountain.  I have a picture of that cave in my brain—­a deep, warm cave, with a floor of soft white sand, a cave into which the two exhausted fugitives stumbled, still hand in hand, and which was home.  But they found it a little too late.  Three days later Jane died.  And there is another picture in my brain—­a picture of young Donald sitting there in the cave, clasping in his arms the cold form of the one creature in the world that he loved; moaning and sobbing over her, calling upon her to come back to life, to open her eyes, to speak to him—­until at last his brain cracked and he went mad.  That is what happened.  He went mad.”