“But he might have got the nuggets somewheres else—­”

“Hold your horses.  Where would he get ’em?  There’s something else suspicious too.  He wrote a letter, the day before he died, and addressed it to Ezra Melville, somewhere in Oregon.  He must just about got it by now—­maybe a few days ago.  He had the clerk mail it for him, and got him to witness it, saying it was his will—­and what did that old hound have to will except a mine?  Next day he wrote another letter somewhere too—­but I didn’t find out who it was to.  If I’d had any gumption I’d got ahold of ’em both.  The point is—­I’m convinced it’s worth a trip, at least.”

“I should say it was worth a trip,” Ray agreed.  “And a fast one, too.  There might be some competition—­”

“There won’t be a rush, if that’s what you mean.  Everybody knows it’s a pocket country, and the men in this town wouldn’t any more get excited about the Yuga River—­”

“True enough—­but that Ezra Melville will be showin’ up one of these days.  We want to be settin’ pretty when he comes.”

“You’ve got the idea.  It ought to be the easiest job we ever did.  It’s my idea he had his claim all laid out, monuments up and everything, and was on his way down to Bradleyburg to record it when he died.  He just went out before he could make the rest of the trip.  All we’ll have to do is go up there, locate in his cabin, and sit tight.”

“Wait just a second.”  Ray was lost in thought.  “There’s an old cabin up that way somewhere—­along that still place—­on the river.  It was a trapping cabin belonging to old Bill Foulks.”

“That’s true enough—­but it likely ain’t near his mine.  Boys, it’s a clean, open-and-shut job—­with absolutely nothing to interfere.  If his brother does come up, he’ll find us in possession—­and nothing to do but go back.  So to-morrow we’ll load up and pack horses and light out.”

“Up Poor Man creek, through Spruce Pass—­”

“Sure.  Then over to the Yuga.  Old Hiram was hunting down some kind of a scent in the vicinity of that old cabin you speak of, last heard of him.  And I wouldn’t be surprised, on second thought, if it wasn’t his base of operations.”

“All easy enough,” Ray agreed.  He paused, and a queer, speculative look came into his wild-beast’s eyes.  “But what I don’t see—­how you can figure all this is going to help me out with Beatrice.”

Jeffery Neilson turned in his chair.  “You can’t, eh?  You need spectacles.  Just think a minute—­say you had fifty or sixty thousand all your own—­to spend on a wife and buy her clothes and automobiles.  Don’t you think that would make you more attractive to the feminine eye?”

At first Ray made no apparent answer.  He merely sat staring ahead.  But plainly the words had wakened riot in his imagination.  Such a sum meant wealth, the power his ambitious nature had always craved, idleness and the gratification of all his lusts.  He was no stranger to greed, this degenerate son of the North.  “It’d help some,” he admitted in a low voice.  “But what makes you think it would be worth that much?”