“Stop, George, I have seen this face in bad company.  Oh! back to our tent for your life, and kill any man you see near it!”

They ran back.  They saw two dark figures melting into the night on the other side the tent.  They darted in—­they felt for the bag.  Gone!  They felt convulsively all round the tent.  Gone!  With trembling hands Robinson struck a light.  Gone—­the work of months in a moment—–­the hope of a life snatched out of a lover’s very hand, and held out a mile off again!

The poor fellows rushed wildly out into the night.  They saw nothing but the wretched decoy vanishing behind the nearest tents.  They came into the tent again.  They sat down and bowed to the blow in silence, and looked at one another, and their lips quivered, and they feared to speak lest they should break into unmanly rage or sorrow.  So they sat like stone till daybreak.

And when the first streak of twilight came in, George said in a firm whisper: 

“Take my hand, Tom, before we go to work.”

So the two friends sat hand in hand a minute or two; and that hard grip of two workingmen’s hands, though it was not gently eloquent like beauty’s soft, expressive palm, did yet say many things good for the heart in this bitter hour.

It said:  “A great calamity has fallen; but we do not blame each other, as some turn to directly and do.  It is not your fault, George.  It is not your fault, Tom.”

It said:  “We were lucky together; now we are unlucky together—­all the more friends.  We wrought together; now we have been wronged together—­all the more friends.”  With this the sun rose, and for the first time they crept to their work instead of springing to it.

They still found gold in it, but not quite so abundant or so large.  They had raised the cream of it for the thieves.  Moreover, a rush had been made to the hole, claims measured off actually touching them; so they could not follow the gold-bearing strata horizontally—­it belonged to their neighbors.  They worked in silence, they ate their meal in silence.  But as they rose to work again, Robinson said, very gravely, even solemnly: 

“George, now I know what an honest man feels when he is robbed of the fruits of his work and his self-denial and his sobriety.  If I had known it fifteen years ago, I should never have been a—­what I have been.”

For two months the friends worked stoutly with leaden hearts, but did little more than pay their expenses.  The bag lay between them light as a feather.  One morning Tom said to George: 

“George, this won’t do.  I am going prospecting.  Moore will lend me his horse for a day.”

That day George worked alone.  Robinson rode all over the country with a tin pan at his back, and tested all the places that seemed likely to his experienced eye.  At night he returned to their tent.  George was just lying down.

“No sleep to-night, George,” said he, instinctively lowering his voice to a whisper; “I have found surface gold ten miles to the southward.”