Longstreet put down his short-handled pick.  Howard noted the act and observed, though the impression at the time was relegated to the outer fringes of his concentrated thought, that the rough head of the instrument and even a portion of the handle looked rusty.  Longstreet removed from his shoulders his canvas specimen-bag.  Plainly, it was heavy; there were a number of samples in it, some as small as robins’ eggs, one the size of a man’s two fists.  He was lifting the bag to dump its contents out upon the table when suddenly Howard pushed by Sanchia and snatched the thing from Longstreet’s hands.  Longstreet stared at him in astonishment; Sanchia caught at his coat.

‘Just a minute,’ said Howard hastily.  Even Helen wondered as he turned and bolted out through the door and sped up the trail toward the spring.  Longstreet looked from the departing figure to his daughter and then to Sanchia, frankly bewildered.  Then all went to the door.  In a moment, Howard returned, the bag hanging limp over his arm, his two hands filled with the fragments of rock which glistened in the lamp-light.

‘I washed them off,’ he said lightly.  ’If there really is gold here we can see it better with all the loose dirt off, can’t we?’ He put them down on the table and stood back, watching Sanchia keenly.

The fine restraint which, in her many encounters with the unexpected, Sanchia had been trained so long and so well to maintain, was gone now in a flash.  Her eyes shone; a rich colour flooded her face; she could not stop her involuntary action until she had literally thrown herself upon the bits of quartz, snatching them up.  For they were streaked and seamed and pitted with gold, such ore as she had never seen.  The avarice gleaming in her eyes for that one instant during which she was thrown off her guard was akin to a light of madness.

But she had herself in hand immediately; she was as one who had slipped slightly upon a polished floor but had caught herself gracefully from falling.  She thrust the rock into Longstreet’s hands; she smiled upon him; she made use of her old familiar gesture of laying her hand upon his arm, as she hardly more than whispered: 

’Dear friend—­and wonderful man—­I am glad for your sake, so tremendously glad.  For now you have vindicated yourself before the world.  Now you have shown them all’—­and in her flashing glance Sanchia managed to include both Alan and Helen sweepingly with an invisible horde whose bitter tongues had been as so many dogs yelping at the excellent Longstreet’s heels—­’now you have shown them all that you are the man I have always contended you were.’  She crowded her smile fuller of what she sought to convey than even she had ever risked before as she murmured at the end, her tones dropping away like dying music:  ‘This is a happy hour in the life of Sanchia Murray!’

‘There’s truth there, if nowhere else,’ cried Helen pointedly.  ’Papa, if you have stumbled on a real gold mine at last, aren’t you wise enough this time to keep still about it?’