He slept at last, and awakening felt the tent heavy upon him.  There was also a curious rawness in the atmosphere, and he glanced about him with a little gasp of consternation.  The hillside gleamed coldly above him under the creeping light, and only the pines were sombre, for the earth was white with snow.

“Get up, Harry,” he said, with something in his voice that roused his comrade suddenly.

Alton rose, and his face became a trifle grim.  “This,” he said quietly, “is going to mix up things.  We’ll have breakfast quick as you can get it.”

They were on their way in half an hour, struggling up the hillside under the pines until at last the trees grew smaller towards the timber line.  Then they floundered painfully over what had been bare slopes of rock and was now a waste of snow, with a dazzling field of whiteness. between them and the blue.  Up there the frost was biting, and the snow lay fine as flour, blowing in thin wisps from under the horse’s hoofs, while the men’s jean and deerhide were sprinkled with glittering particles.  The wind dropped towards sundown, and when, climbing a great hill shoulder, they dipped again to the forest the snows flamed crimson, against a pitiless blueness, out of which there seemed to fall a devastating cold.

Diamonds glinted upon the shivering pines, sound seemed frozen, and there was a great impressive stillness across which the jingle of the bridle rang stridently when Alton pulled the horse up near the foremost of the trees.

“This,” he said softly, “is where I found Jimmy.  He was sitting there with his rifle on his knee, looking straight at me, as though there were lots of things he could tell me.”

Seaforth shivered a little.  “He had the specimens with him?”

Alton nodded.  “Yes,” he said.  “He had his grip right on the deerhide bag, as though he didn’t want to let me have them, and I had to think of Mrs. Jimmy while I took them from him.  It didn’t seem quite fair of Jimmy, because they haven’t much use for silver in the country the long trail leads to.”

Seaforth glanced down into the great hollow that fell away beneath them, and up at the glittering snow.  “You were alone, I think?”

“I was,” said Alton grimly.  “And most half-frozen.  It was that cold there was ice in the big rapid, and I hadn’t had much to eat for several days.”

Seaforth shivered again, as he pictured that strange encounter between the dead and the living.  Jimmy the prospector, having taken his secret with him to a region where silver is valueless, had sat within a few paces from where he stood with his fingers clenched upon the bag, and an awful disregard of the rights of the woman he had left behind in his frozen face.  Seaforth could also picture his comrade stooping over him with averted eyes, but swift, resolute movements, for when there was work to be done Alton of Somasco was not the man to turn aside.