CHAPTER XIII.

"Gold! Gold! Gold!" screamed the excitable and drunken Corsican, as he danced about the tent.

At the bright gleam of the yellow metal, Rex had sprung forward and grasped the precious specimen from the Thron-Diuck's hand.

"Where did you get this?" he demanded, breathlessly.

A look of cunning overspread the Indian's coppery features, and discolored teeth were displayed in his gaping grin.

"Give fire-water," he said, fawningly, "then me tell."

Britton examined the piece of ore from every angle in the candle-light and recognized a wonderful sample of alluvial gold. It weighed probably eight ounces, and Rex trembled in excitement not to be repressed. There was no doubt of its origin, and he knew that the carousing rascal must be speaking the truth. The glacier-worn edges of the specimen told that it had come from a heavy deposit, a place of "big gold."

"Where did you get this?" Rex hoarsely repeated, his hands shaking as if weighted down with golden pounds instead of ounces.

"Bring whiskey, then me tell where heap much gold come from," was the Indian's laconic response.

"No, you won't," said Britton. "You'll tell first, and then you may have the fire-water."

He dived into a small kitty-bag wherein he kept some few medicinal mixtures, whipped out the solitary flask, which he was accustomed to carry against a possible dire emergency of the rigorous trails, and held it enticingly before the candle flame.

The liquor sparkled in the light, and the poor red wretch smacked his lips and clawed at it. Rex held him off.

"Afterwards-afterwards," he said with decision.

"Ha!" exclaimed the tantalized Indian, "go heap long way up the White River-"

"The Klondike?" interrupted Rex.

"Yes, as you call, Mis'r," answered the Thron-Diuck, gesticulating frantically with lean, bony fingers like talons. "Go heap way up Klondike; find ice-hills with much frozen springs; there big gold where him be!" His claws pointed at the sample in Britton's fist.

"You mean the headwaters of the Klondike-its source?" questioned Rex, earnestly. "You're sure of that? For heaven's sake don't make any mistake!"

The Indian shook his whole body and stamped in anger.

"Me no mistake," he declared. "Me no lie. Go heap way up where you say, Mis'r, to-to-"

"To the headwaters," prompted Britton.

"Yes, to big chief waters! There five hills like heap big beaver houses all by one dam. White River run through. There place of heap big gold!"

Rex wiped the beads of perspiration from his forehead.

"This is the way I understand you," he said. "Listen and tell me if I'm right! The place lies straight up the Klondike at its headwaters, right in the middle of five beaver-house hills which the stream cuts through. Is that correct?"

"Right, heap right," replied the Thron-Diuck, overjoyed at being properly understood. He reached for the whiskey again, but Britton was not yet done.

"Wait till I draw a sketch," he said quickly, "and you shall mark these hills in the exact spot."

Rex found his map of the Klondike River in his breast pocket and drew the stream on a larger scale upon a sheet from a notebook. At the river's mouth was a deserted Indian village, lately occupied by Thron-Diucks who had moved back into the fastnesses of the snowy mountains, and no other trace of habitation marked the frozen waterway, which lost itself in bleak heights away to the north, unexplored except by Indians and a few venturesome white trappers.

"Now," said Britton, when he had outlined the sketch, "show me exactly where these hills stand from the source or headwaters of the river."

The Indian touched his talons to the drawing just below a group of low mountains, named on the map the Klondike Hills.

"How far below?" Rex questioned very earnestly.

"Half day, as you call, Mis'r," the Thron-Diuck answered. "Half day with heap good dogs!"

"So?" cried Britton, warming to the scent of the treasure. "How many hills on this side of the stream?"

The Indian located three with as many dabs of his skinny forefinger and showed where the other two hills lay across the river. Rex marked them with small circles, mentally calculating by the scale their distance from the source and thus knowing their position at least approximately.

The Thron-Diuck regarded his handiwork with satisfaction.

"Heap right," he said triumphantly, "Mis'r heap smart man! Give fire-water, Mis'r; you got much big gold!"

Rex passed over the flask without further parley.

"Yes, it's yours," was his final word, "but heaven help you if you have deceived me as to the position of this stuff!"

Lessari lurched forward to share the Indian's draught, but Britton pushed him rudely back upon his bed.

"You go right to sleep," he ordered, "and get fit for the trail in the morning."

Rex sat beside him to enforce the obeyance of the order till the Corsican dropped into slumber, while over beside the camp stove the Thron-Diuck lay in stupefaction.

The thermometer registered forty-eight below when Britton and Lessari mushed out of the North Samson valley at sunrise. The Indian, now partly sobered and conscious that he had sold a well-guarded secret of his tribe, promptly proceeded to efface himself despite the inducements Britton offered him to act in the capacity of guide, so that the two travelled alone.

As they advanced upon the lonely trail which snaked northward to where the Klondike's source was somewhere hidden in unknown hills, the atmosphere grew keener with intense cold. A merciless, cutting frost fell in fine showers till the two men were covered with a hoary coating which scintillated like glaring tinsel. The icy powder stopped their ears and choked their nostrils, chilling every breath they took.

Lessari unfitted by his natural temperament for such a climate as the Yukon, had always found his respiration labored in winter, and, since he had contracted a severe cold from his soaking in Lake Bennett, his plight was now worse than ever.

Owing to the pressure on his chest he was forced to breathe through the open mouth. Britton pleaded with him not to do this, but the finer fibred Corsican could not endure the strain on his nasal passages and relapsed into breathing between parted lips. As a result, he soon chilled his lungs and began to cough with a dry, hacking sound which Rex heard with foreboding dread.

The mercury dropped lower with every mile they mushed. Icicles formed on their eyebrows, noses and chins, while thin films of ice encased their cheeks, prohibiting any speech.

A thickness of hoar-frost decorated the loaded sled, and the hairy backs of the five dogs were white with it. At intervals they shook themselves roughly in the harness, sending ice particles flying in all directions.

Mingled with this rattle and the grinding song of the sleigh was the leader's "gruff! gruff!" as he blew the congealed snow from his nose.

Camp was made at noon outside an immense ravine which Rex knew by hearsay to be the great canon of the Klondike. After an hour's rest and a good meal they entered it, finding a precipitous-sided gorge of stupendous size and beauty.

The gigantic gray walls, seamed and full of wide cracks, sloped upward, forming an almost complete arch overhead that admitted a dull glow of light to mingle with the white sheen of the ice below. Great icicles hung by thousands from the rock-crevices, while eternal drippings through the cavern-like roof had formed immense ice columns resembling unsmoothed marble pillars.

The scene before Britton and Lessari looked like a weird, uncanny ice forest full of frozen trunks and clammy, oozy nooks where underworld spirits and grotesque goblins might be expected to reside. The hollow booming of the mighty river, straining in its imprisonment, filled the whole place with a resounding roar, and the force of the fettered torrent shook the coated cave walls till the icicles fell and scattered their rainbow hues upon the floor.

Rex thought this canon was the most potent symbol of a potent land that could be imagined. It impressed him vividly with the awesome magnitude, the salient ruggedness, the terrible power of the country of which it was an emblem.

His dog-train swayed with shrieking runners among the massed ice-pillars and emerged from the gorge into a wider valley where the hills rose naturally bright in the sunshine with the welcome blue sky resting upon their peaks.

Britton could see that the Klondike River was the main recipient of the long trains of ice which slid with snail-like motion from the crests of the glaciers. Frozen gullies full of these moving, mile-long torrents broke in upon the larger river and piled the junction points full of massive, chaotic ice-bridges which were painfully difficult to cross.

Lessari stumbled upon one huge jam and went down among the sharp, crystal fragments. He gasped when he regained his feet, and the dry, hacking cough became more convulsive. Seeing that he was nearly spent, Rex beckoned for a few minutes' halt, though having hopes of reaching mountainous shelter before nightfall, he did not wish to delay very long.

While they rested on a high ice-bridge quite a distance above the Klondike Canon, they heard a thin, hissing wail far back in its depths.

"Sled!" exclaimed the listening Corsican, breaking into speech without thinking of the consequence.

At his effort the icy casing which covered his cheeks snapped in showering splinters, gashing the skin in a dozen places. He groaned in pain while the blood trickled down his face.

Britton thawed his mouth free by the warm pressure of his fur gauntlets.

"You're right, Lessari," he said. "It sounds like a dog-train coming through the canon. Surely that cursed Indian hasn't been spreading the news! Or perhaps someone has trailed us from Samson because they think we know of a find up this way."

Britton's tone was angry as well as disappointed. He had not undertaken the dangerous and arduous trip up the Klondike for the purpose of showing the way to some trailers who might contest the ground with him. If any rough characters were following because they suspected he had knowledge of a gold deposit, Rex knew he would have to fight for what he found, and fight, no doubt, with the odds against him.

"We'll wait and see who is tracking us," he grimly observed to Lessari.

The whining sound of a dog-train continued, borne through the cold void with clear persistence. Rex strained his eyes on the distant mouth of the canon to mark who came out, but he watched in vain. The noise ceased as suddenly as it arose, and though they dallied another fifteen minutes, nothing could be seen.

"That's odd," commented Britton. "Wasn't it a dog-sled, Lessari?"

"Sound like him much!" answered the Corsican, in an awed voice. He was somewhat superstitious, and he nursed his cut face apprehensively, as if it were responsible for the strange incident.

"I could have sworn to that as the shriek of runners," Rex declared, "but it may have been ice. In any event we can't stop longer. Ho! there-mush, mush!"

They forged on, climbing to a still higher altitude and meeting with a frigid air that reached to the very marrow of their bones. Lessari weakened, and Britton made him take to the sled for the rest of the afternoon while he himself continued his heart-breaking tramp beside the dogs, surmounting all obstacles, no matter how formidable, with that intrepid grit and unbroken muscle-strength which was his heritage.

The short, sub-Arctic day closed in swiftly, shrouding everything with a heavy fog, and night caught the two travellers among the black river boulders.

It was a desolate place of incomparable bleakness in which they were forced to camp, but when the stove was set going inside the pitched tent and they had infused some heat into their frost-tried bodies, the outlook seemed more cheerful.

The next day saw a repetition of their hardships and trials. Lessari declared himself strong enough to keep his feet, but Britton forced him to ride behind the dogs. The Corsican lay wrapped in robes, and the spasms of coughing that wrenched his frame told about how fit he was to travel the trail afoot. There were places so rough and so hard to scale that he could not stay upon the loaded sled while the dogs dragged it over. At such points he was compelled to walk, and Rex had to assist him.

They had penetrated into the timbered regions which flanked the Klondike, and the way grew wilder although there was some solace of shelter. According to Britton's estimate of the Thron-Diuck's directions the place of the five mountains could not be many miles distant, and, even in that soul-chilling waste, his blood warmed every inch of his body when he thought success might soon reward his strenuous stampedes.

With the reaching of the forested stretches, grizzly tracks were seen in profusion, indicating that these hungry prowlers were finding the severe weather very hard, for they had covered vast distances in search of food.

As they traversed mile after mile, making rapid progress without hindrance of blistered ice, Britton began to think that his hopes of camping that night among the five beaver-house hills would be realized. Every time they rested for a moment to give the dogs a breathing spell, he eagerly scanned the sketch which he had made. From the contour of the river and the position of the mountains he tried to judge exactly how far he had advanced. Each scrutiny, thus indulged in, gave fresh hope and assurance, and he would dash on with greater speed than was generally attained on the Fields.

The steep granite headlands gave place to more sloping bluffs, and when Britton's dog-train swept round the river's curve past the first long belt of pine forest, there loomed at a probable distance of six miles the tops of five hills set in a circle.

"It's the place," he shouted joyfully. "By heaven, it's the place-Lessari!"

But Lessari, his endurance worn out by the continual jolting, had rolled from the sled in a dead faint. He could not be revived easily, so Britton had to pitch the tent, light a fire, and attend to him.

The Corsican came to, weak and trembling, and when Rex had given some nourishment, Lessari looked at him with dazed, troubled eyes.

"I am much sorrow," he said confusedly. "Your journey I spoil! Put me on the sled, and it somehow we can reach."

Britton felt a twinge of conscience for a selfish wish as he heard these words from a man who was courageous to the core though obviously unable to continue.

"No," he gravely replied, "you haven't spoiled the journey. We can well rest here and go on to-morrow. Make your mind easy, Lessari!"

The Corsican, still lamenting the check to their advance, fell into an exhausted sleep, while Britton, the selfish desire recurring involuntarily within him, chafed silently as he watched from a distance the peaks of his far-sought gold Mecca.