“Jim,” he said, in his way of bluntness, “there ain’t no horse you can git, but I warned you ’bout the claim, and I don’t want to see you lose it, all fer nothin’.”

“He’s worse,” said Jim, his eyes wildly blazing with love for the fatherless, motherless little man.  “If only I had the resolution, Bone, I’d go and git that shrub on foot.”

“You’d lose yer claim,” said Bone.

Miss Doc came out to the door where they stood.  She was wringing her hands.

“Jim,” she said, “if you think you kin, anyhow, git that Injun stuff, why don’t you go and git it?”

Jim looked at her fixedly.  Not before had he known that she felt the case to be so nearly hopeless.  Despair took a grip on his vitals.  A something of sympathy leaped from the woman’s heart to his—­a something common to them both—­in the yearning that a helpless child had stirred.

“I’ll get my hat and go,” he said, and he went in the house, to appear almost instantly, putting on the battered hat, but clothed far too thinly for the rigors of the weather.

“But, Jim, it’s beginning to snow, right now,” objected Bone.

“I may get back before it’s dark,” old Jim replied.

“I can see you’re goin’ to lose the claim,” insisted Bone.

“I’m goin’ to git that shrub!” said Jim.  “I won’t come back till I git that shrub.”

He started off through the gate at the back of the house, his long, lank figure darkly cut against the background of the white that lay upon the slope.  A flurry of blinding snow came suddenly flying on the wind.  It wrapped him all about and hid him in its fury, and when the calmer falling of the flakes commenced he had disappeared around the shoulder of the hill.

CHAPTER XV

THE GOLD IN BOREALIS

The men to whom the bar-keep told the story of Jim and his start into the mountains smiled again.  The light in their eyes was half of affection and half of concern.  They could not believe the shiftless old miner would long remain away in the snow and wind, where more than simple resolution was required to keep a man afoot.  They would see him back before the darkness settled on the world, perhaps with something in his hand by way of a weed, if not precisely the “Injun” thing he sought.

But the darkness came and Jim was not at hand.  The night and the snow seemed swirling down together in the gorge, from every lofty uprise of the hills.  It was not so cold as the previous storm, yet it stung with its biting force.

At six o’clock the blacksmith called at the Dennihans’, in some anxiety.  Doc himself threw open the door, in response to the knock.  How small and quiet he appeared, here at home!

“No, he ’ain’t showed up,” he said of Jim.  “I don’t know when he’ll come.”

Webber reported to the boys.

“Well, mebbe he’s gone, after all,” said Field.