The Collected Works of James Oliver Curwood (Illustrated Edition). James Oliver Curwood

fell from the pathfinder's lips as he dropped the pellet in the palm of his hand.

      It was a strange-looking object, smooth, and curiously flattened.

      "Ver' soft bullet," said Mukoki. "Never know lead thin, thin out lak that!"

      With his knife he peeled off a thin slice of the ball.

      "Heem—"

      He held up the two pieces. In the sun they gleamed a dull, rich yellow.

      "That bullet made of gold!" he breathed, scarcely above a whisper. "No yellow lead. That gold, pure gold!"

CHAPTER IX

      UP THE OMBABIKA

       Table of Contents

      For a few moments after Mukoki's remarkable discovery the three stood speechless. Wabigoon stared as if he could not bring himself to believe the evidence of his eyes. Rod was quivering with the old, thrilling excitement that had first come to him in the cabin where they had found the skeletons and the buckskin bag with its precious nuggets, and Mukoki's face was a study. The thin, long fingers which held the two pieces of the gold bullet trembled, which was an unusual symptom in the old pathfinder. It was he who broke the silence, and his words gave utterance to the question which had rushed into the heads of the two young hunters.

      "Who shoot gold bullets at bear?"

      And to this question there was, for the time, absolutely no answer. To tell who shot that bullet was impossible. But why was it used?

      Wabigoon had taken the parts of the yellow ball and was weighing them in the palm of his hand.

      "It weighs an ounce," he declared.

      "Twenty dollars' worth of gold!" gasped Rod, as if he lacked breath to express himself. "Who in the wide world is shooting twenty dollar bullets at bear?" he cried more excitedly, repeating Mukoki's question of a minute before.

      He, too, weighed the yellow pellets in his hand.

      The puzzled look had gone out of Mukoki's face. 'Again the battle-scarred old warrior wore the stoic mask of his race, which only now and then is lifted for an instant by some sudden and unexpected happening. Behind that face, immobile, almost expressionless, worked a mind alive to every trick and secret of the vast solitudes, and even before his young comrades had gained the use of their tongues he was, in his savage imagination, traveling swiftly back over the trail of the monster bear to the gun that had fired the golden bullet. Wabigoon understood him, and watched him eagerly.

      "What do you think of it, Muky?"

      "Man shoot powder and ball gun, not cartridge," replied Mukoki slowly. "Old gun. Strange; ver' strange!"

      "A muzzle loader!" said Wabi.

      The Indian nodded.

      "Had powder, no lead. Got hungry; used gold."

      Eight words had told the story, or at least enough of it to clear away a part of the cloud of mystery, but the other part still remained.

      Who had fired the bullet, and where had the gold come from?

      "He must have struck it rich," said Wabi "else would he have a chunk of gold like that?"

      "Where that come from—more, much! more," agreed Mukoki shortly.

      "Do you suppose—" began Rod. There was a curious thrill in his voice, and he paused, as if scarce daring to venture the rest of what he had meant to say. "Do you suppose—somebody has found—our gold?"

      Mukoki and Wabigoon stared at him as if he had suddenly exploded a mine. Then Wabi turned and looked silently at the old Indian. Not a word was spoken. Silently Rod drew something from his pocket, carefully wrapped in a bit of cloth.

      "You remember I kept this little nugget from my share in the buckskin bag, intending to have a scarf-pin made of it," he explained. "When I took my course in geology and mineralogy I learned that, if one had half a dozen specimens of gold, each from a different mine, the chances were about ten to one that no two of them would be exactly alike in coloring. Now—"

      He exposed the nugget, and made a fresh cut in it with his knife, as Mukoki had done with the yellow bullet. Then the two gleaming surfaces were compared.

      One glance was sufficient.

      The gold was the same!

      Wabi drew back, uttering something under his breath, his eyes gleaming darkly. Rod's face had suddenly turned a shade whiter, and Mukoki, not understanding the mysteries of mineralogy, stared at the youth in mute suspense.

      "Somebody has found our gold!" cried Wabi, almost savagely.

      "We are not sure," interrupted Rod. "We know only that the evidence is very suspicious. The rock formation throughout this country is almost identically the same, deep trap on top, with slate beneath, and for that reason it is very possible that gold found right in this locality would be of exactly the same appearance as gold found two hundred miles from here. Only—it's suspicious," Rod concluded.

      "Man probably dead," consoled Mukoki. "No lead—hungry—shoot bear an' no git heem. Mebby starve!"

      "The poor devil!" exclaimed Wabigoon. "We've been too selfish to give a thought to that, Rod. Of course he was hungry, or he wouldn't have used gold for bullets. And he didn't get this bear! By George—"

      "I wish he'd got him," said Rod simply.

      Somehow Mukoki's words sent a flush into his face. There came to him, suddenly, a mental picture of that possible tragedy in the wilderness: the starving man, his last hopeless molding of a golden bullet, the sight of the monster bear, the shot, and after that the despair and suffering and slow death of the man who had fired it.

      "I wish he'd got it," he repeated. "We have plenty of grub."

      Mukoki was already at work skinning the bear, and Rod and Wabigoon unsheathed their knives and joined him.

      "Wound 'bout fi', six month old," said the Indian. "Shot just before snow."

      "When there wasn't a berry in the woods for a starving man to eat," added Wabi. "Well, here's hoping he found something, Rod."

      An hour later the three gold seekers returned to their canoe laden with the choicest of the bear meat, and the animal's skin, which was immediately stretched between two trees, high up out of the reach of depredating animals. Rod gazed at it proudly.

      "We'll be sure and get it when we come back, won't we?"

      "Sure," replied Wabi.

      "It will be safe?"

      "As safe as though it were at home."

      "Unless somebody comes along and steals it," added Rod.

      Wabi was busy unloading certain necessary articles from the canoe, but he ceased his work to look at Rod.

      "Steal!" he cried in astonishment.

      Mukoki, too, had heard Rod's remark and was listening.

      "Rod," continued Wabigoon quietly, "that is one thing we don't have up here. Our great big glorious North doesn't know the word thief, except when it is applied to a Woonga. If a white hunter came along here to-morrow, and found that hide stretched so low that the animals were getting at it, he would nail it higher for us. An Indian, if he camped here, would build his fire so that the sparks wouldn't strike it. Rod, up here, where we don't know civilization, we're honest!"

      "But down in the States," said Rod, "the Indians steal."

      The words slipped from him. The next instant he would have given anything to have been able to recall them. Mukoki had grown a little more tense in his attitude.

      "That's because white men have lived so much among them, white men who are called civilized," answered the young scion of Wabinosh House, his eyes growing bright. "White blood makes thieves. Pardon me