"The Ophir on the Comstock Was rich as bread and honey; The Gould and Curry, farther south, Was raking out the money; The Savage and the others Had machinery all complete, When in came the Groshes And nipped all our feet."
When he had completed the verse, he had slowly gazed round and caught the look of amaze which had dawned in the countenances of his drunken associates. He had come to himself and grown sober. Suddenly an expression of intense fear and hatred had shot into his eyes; without saying another word, he had turned his back on the company and gone out into the early morning, floated his canoe, and fled as one who was pursued for his life. That verse had explained many of Beorn's eccentricities to one of those who had heard it, and he had told the rest. Its singing had meant that, sometime in the early sixties, Beorn had taken part in the gold-rush to the Comstock, and had worked and prospected in the Nevada mines.
This was his solitary glaring indiscretion in all the course of his forty years spent in Keewatin. Though he had had many opportunities since then to repeat the event when under the influence of liquor, he had allowed nothing more of any importance to escape his lips. He had never spent much time at God's Voice, only turning up at the end of his hunt to dispose of his catch of furs, after which he would vanish into the wilderness again. He avoided on every occasion and was restless in the company of men. Very rarely was he encountered on his hunting-trips by any of the Indians or trappers. When once he had set out, he was not seen again until he returned of his own choice. The few times that he had been met, he was far to the northward, about the point where the Last Chance and Forbidden Rivers join, whence they flow on together till they tumble their crowded waters into the freedom of the Hudson Bay. Because it was always in this locality that he had been met, a rumour got abroad that, when his body was not dwelling among living men, it journeyed up the Forbidden River, to reunite with his exiled soul in the habitations of the dead.
Granger had listened to all these reports from time to time, but he had paid small heed to them; he was certain in his own mind that, should he live solitarily in Keewatin for forty years, as Beorn had done, a similar web of legend would be woven about himself. The man's conduct was to him self-explanatory; in his early manhood he had committed some passionate wrong, and had fled into the wilderness to escape the penalty, only to find that the executioner was there before him--the Silence, and that the enduring of loneliness was a more cruel punishment than any that an earthly judge could have measured out. The boat was one and the same which carried Beorn, Spurling, and himself. He promised himself that, by and by, as in the case of Peggy, he would break through Beorn's silence, get to know the man, plunge deep down till he held his heart in his hand.