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The small, angular pieces were all arranged, and his chief stared at them with profound geological interest. Fisette did not move. He had looked forward to this moment. "They're no good," came the level voice, after a pause, "but you're in the right country. Go back for another two months. You'll get it yet. It should be near this," he picked up a sample.
It was not one in which tenderfeet deserted their jobs and took to the hills, but a stirring amongst the stiff bones of old prospectors who had given up the fight but were now infused with new courage. In Fisette they saw the man who had won out for the second time while they sat and smoked.
And what darkened Belding's horizon was the thought that Clark, at any moment, might swing toward Elsie Worden. Two miles away, Fisette was at home with his children. He was tired but in no way worn out, and in his pocket was one single piece of ore kept as a souvenir. Clark's check lay safely deposited in the bank and the halfbreed's teeth gleamed when he thought of the mortgage.
In imagination he was putting up blast furnaces. "It will mean a good deal for the town, won't it?" He nodded. "The biggest thing yet St. Marys is all right now." "And it was that dirty old Fisette who found the mine?" Belding chuckled. "He's not old nor dirty, and was the best prospector of the lot. Yes, he found it." "Goodness! were there many of them?" "About twenty.
The rock lay exposed and glistening, its polished surface scarred with the scratches of hard stones that once lay embedded in the feet of prehistoric glaciers, but Fisette, screwing his bushy brows over a tiny magnifying glass and peering at the sparkling fragments in his palm and balancing their weight, cared nothing for glaciers.
These moments are few and rapt and precious, and they glowed in the slow brain of the half-breed Fisette as nothing else had ever glowed. It was true that he stood to do well and earn independence out of this discovery, but he was conscious at the instant of a reward greater than ease and comfort and money to spend. He had backed himself, single-handed, against the wilderness, and he had won.
He had been near death, but as he stared at his conqueror he felt a contemptuous pity for him. Fisette had moved away and was fumbling in his pockets. Presently he looked up. "You got a match?" Manson searched, while his relaxing muscles trembled like quicksilver. He found a match and held it out. "Now go to hell!" said the half-breed calmly, and recommenced the ritual of smoke.
But not a word had escaped the sharp ears of the man who moved so silently beside the fire. 'Iron! They had iron, but apparently did not know it. Fisette felt in his pocket for the small angular fragment he always carried, and was about to hand it to Wimperley, when again he remembered Clark's command. He was to say nothing to any one.
A moment later he looked up. Fisette was sitting on his chest, and running his thumb along the razor edge of the blade. There was a little blood at the corner of his mouth and his cheek was scratched. Otherwise he was undisturbed. "Well?" he grunted presently, staring through half-closed lids. Manson was pumping air into a laboring breast. "I'm licked," he panted after a while. "Say that again."
An hour later two buckboards drew up in front of the hotel and the four stepped down, a little stiff, but utterly content. As Riggs took his basket from Fisette, he coughed a little awkwardly. "Look here, you fellows, I'm going to send my fish to R.F.C. with our compliments. It's only decent." "Well," remarked Birch reflectively, "you might as well.
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