“Why Grandfather! What—” The girl looked at him in alarm.
He was gone. Leading on at a pace that was hard to follow, he headed directly for the lone pine.
Once there, he dropped on hands and knees to point at some object protruding from the gnarled trunk of the giant tree.
“The knife!” he said hoarsely. “The knife!”
At that he fell backward, panting for breath.
All the splendid color left Faye Duncan’s cheeks as she bent over his prostrate form and began struggling with the buttons of his mackinaw and shirt.
“It’s his heart,” she said. “There’s nothing much we can do. He’ll come round presently. But some day—”
She did not finish, but the wrinkles that came in her brow told all.
“But what does it mean?” said Johnny pointing to the hilt of a hunting knife that protruded a short two inches from the trunk of the pine. “Must have been there twenty years. A few years more and it would have been completely buried.”
If Faye Duncan knew what that knife meant and why it had stirred up such violent emotions in her grandfather’s breast, she did not say so. She sat staring at the thing that had brought tragedy so near.
Giving up the problem, Johnny kindled a small fire, then put water on to boil for coffee.
Presently the old man sat up to stare dully about him. The instant his eyes fell upon the knife hilt they were alight once more.
“Twenty-one years!” he muttered, pressing his forehead once more. “Twenty-one years! All these years, and now I have found it—perhaps too late.”
At that he began fumbling at an inside coat pocket. In the end he drew forth a small square packet. Having unrolled a wad of thin oiled cloth, he unfolded a square of soft white skin. On this, done perhaps in pencil and later traced with India ink, were many lines and strangely shaped figures. Here and there words were written.
Drawn involuntarily to his side, the boy and girl stared at the map with surprised and eager eyes.
Johnny read words written there: “The river,” “Mountains,” “The Pass,” “The cabin,” he read. And last, but not least, “Green Gold.”
Apparently quite unconscious of their presence, the old man placed a trembling finger on a certain spot and mumbled:
“We are here. The trail leads downstream, four miles perhaps. The river forks there. We cross the river below the fork, and ascend the upper fork. The trail leads over the mountains. The cabin lies beyond the mountain, the cabin and green gold. A mine of green gold. That was Timmie’s dream. But then, perhaps he was mad. But there was green gold, quantities of it, and so heavy, so—”