Joanne’s breath was coming brokenly through her lips.  Unconsciously she had clasped her fingers about the hand Aldous rested on her pommel.

“How long he remained in the cave with his dead, MacDonald has never been able to say,” he resumed.

“He doesn’t know whether he buried his wife or left her lying on the sand floor of the cave.  He doesn’t know how he got out of the mountains.  But he did, and his mind came back.  And since then, Joanne—­for a matter of forty years—­his life has been spent in trying to find that cave.  All those years his search was unavailing.  He could find no trace of the little hidden valley in which the treasure-seekers found their bonanza of gold.  No word of it ever came out of the mountains; no other prospector ever stumbled upon it.  Year after year Donald went into the North; year after year he came out as the winter set in, but he never gave up hope.

“Then he began spending winter as well as summer in that forgotten world—­forgotten because the early gold-rush was over, and the old Telegraph trail was travelled more by wolves than men.  And always, Donald has told me, his beloved Jane’s spirit was with him in his wanderings over the mountains, her hand leading him, her voice whispering to him in the loneliness of the long nights.  Think of it, Joanne!  Forty years of that!  Forty years of a strange, beautiful madness, forty years of undying love, of faith, of seeking and never finding!  And this spring old Donald came almost to the end of his quest.  He knows, now; he knows where that little treasure valley is hidden in the mountains, he knows where to find the cave!”

“He found her—­he found her?” she cried.  “After all those years—­he found her?”

“Almost,” said Aldous softly.  “But the great finale in the tragedy of Donald MacDonald’s life is yet to come, Ladygray.  It will come when once more he stands in the soft white sand of that cavern floor, and sometimes I tremble when I think that when that moment comes I will be at his side.  To me it will be terrible.  To him it will be—­what?  That hour has not quite arrived.  It happened this way:  Old Donald was coming down from the North on the early slush snows this spring when he came to a shack in which a man was almost dead of the smallpox.  It was DeBar, the half-breed.

“Fearlessly MacDonald nursed him.  He says it was God who sent him to that shack.  For DeBar, in his feverish ravings, revealed the fact that he had stumbled upon that little Valley of Gold for which MacDonald had searched through forty years.  Old Donald knew it was the same valley, for the half-breed raved of dead men, of rotting buckskin sacks of yellow nuggets, of crumbling log shacks, and of other things the memories of which stabbed like knives into Donald’s heart.  How he fought to save that man!  And, at last, he succeeded.