Old Elk and Wee Johnnie Tamarack looked on in stolid silence, while the young man, with wildly beating heart, crammed a pack-sack with samples.  He had found the ancient mine—­the lost mine of the Indians, which men said existed only in the fancy of Bob MacNair’s brain!  Carefully sealing the tunnel, the young man headed for Fort Norman; and never did Old Elk and Wee Johnnie Tamarack face such a trail.  Down the raging torrent of the Coppermine, across the long portage to the Dismal Lakes, and then by portage and river to Dease Bay, across the two hundred miles of Great Bear Lake, and down the Bear River to their destination.

Seven hundred long miles they covered, at a man-killing pace that brought them into the fort, hollow-eyed and gaunt, and with their bodies swollen and raw from the sting of black flies and mosquitoes that swarmed through the holes in their tattered garments.

The men wolfed down the food that was set before them by an Indian woman, and then, while Old Elk and Wee Johnnie Tamarack slept, the chief trader led Bob MacNair to the grave of his father.

“‘Twas his heart, lad, or somethin’ busted inside him,” explained the old man.  “After supper it was, two weeks agone.  He was sittin’ i’ his chair wi’ his book an’ his pipe, an’ me in anither beside him.  He gi’ a deep sigh, like, an’ his book fell to the ground and his pipe.  When I got to him his head was leant back ag’in his chair—­and he was dead.”

Bob MacNair nodded, and the chief trader returned to the store, leaving the young man standing silent beside the fresh-turned mound with its rudely fashioned wooden cross, that stood among the other grass-grown mounds whose wooden crosses, with their burned inscriptions, were weather-grey and old.  For a long time he stood beside the little crosses that lent a solemn dignity to the rugged heights of Fort Norman.

It cannot be said that Bob MacNair had loved his father, in the generally accepted sense of the word.  But he had admired and respected him above all other men, and his first thought upon the discovery of the lost mine was to vindicate his course in the eyes of this stern, just man who had so strongly advised against it.

For the opinion of others he cared not the snap of his fingers.  But, to read approval in the deep-set eyes of his father, and to hear the deep, rich voice of him raised, at last, in approbation, rather than reproach, he had defied death and pushed himself and his Indians to the limit of human endurance.  And he had arrived too late.  The bitterness of the young man’s soul found expression only in a hardening of the jaw and a clenching of the mighty fists.  For, in the heart of him, he knew that in the future, no matter what the measure of the world might be, always, deep within him would rankle the bitter disappointment—­the realization that this old man had gone to his grave believing that his son was a fool and a wastrel.