How often his father had talked of the great lumps of gold the white men were digging up, two hundred miles north, up the Frozen River—­“Cariboo gold,” his father had called it, and said that it was sent down in numberless bags to “the front,” and the stage brought it.  And his father would always finish the tale with, “The white men will risk their lives and kill each other for this gold.”

Leloo could never understand it, for he would much rather have a soft wolf skin to lie on, a string of blue Hudson’s Bay beads around his dark throat, and fine, beaded moccasins, than all the gold in the world.  But while he sat stock still, the voices continued: 

“There, it’s stopped.  I knew it was an animal.  The stage won’t be along for an hour yet.”

“They are white men, but the gold does not belong to them,” Leloo told himself.  “It belongs to the white men on the stage, or up in the Barkerville gold ledges.  These white men here are ‘bad medicine.’  They shall not find that stage.”

But even as he thought it out, the voices began afresh.

“There’s something wrong with my gun,” said one, “it won’t work.”

“There’s nothing wrong with mine,” came the sneering reply. “Mine will work all right.  I’m going to have that gold.”

“How much did Jim Orton say there was a-coming down on the stage?” whispered the other.

“Some twenty thousand dollars’ worth of nuggets,” was the answer.  “And you’ll use your gun, too, to get it, if you don’t turn coward.”

Then there was silence.  So his father was right.  These white men would kill each other for gold—­gold that belonged to another, to the men who were working day and night for it up at the ledges, two hundred miles north.  Instantly Leloo’s plan was formed.  He would save the gold for the men who owned it; save the good stage driver from the bullets of these hiding, whispering sneaks and robbers.  But how was he to do it?  How could he dare to move a step unless to turn backward?  Twenty yards ahead of him the two men crouched.  Even by their lowered voices he could locate them as hiding behind a giant boulder, some ten feet above the trail.  If he was to advance to meet the stage and warn the driver, he needs must pass under their very feet.  Was it quite impossible to daringly gallop under their guns and be lost in the darkness before they could recover from their surprise?  Leloo could trust his cayuse, he knew.  The honest little creature was at this moment standing still as the silence about them.  Then acutely across that silence cut the long wail of a lonely wolf wandering across the heights.  A very inspiration seized Leloo.  In a second he had flung back his head, and from his thin, Indian boyish lips there issued a weird, prolonged howl.  He was answering the wolf in his own language.