“Gold?”

She told him then, breaking her own promise magnificently, as a woman will.

“Go, ride with Bridger,” she went on.  “Don’t tell him you ever knew me.  He’ll not be apt to speak of me.  But they found it, in California, the middle of last winter—­gold!  Gold!  Carson’s here in our camp—­Kit Carson.  He’s the first man to bring it to the Valley of the Platte.  He was sworn to keep it secret; so was Bridger, and so am I. Not to Oregon, Will—­California!  You can live down your past.  If we die, God bless the man I do love.  That’s you, Will!  And I’m going to marry—­him.  Ten days!  On the trail!  And he’ll kill you, Will!  Oh, keep away!”

She paused, breathless from her torrent of incoherent words, jealous of the passing moments.  It was vague, it was desperate, it was crude.  But they were in a world vague, desperate and crude.

“I’ve promised my men I’d not leave them,” he said at last.  “A promise is a promise.”

“Then God help us both!  But one thing—­when I’m married, that’s the end between us.  So good-by.”

He leaned his head back on his saddle for a time, his tired horse turning back its head.  He put out his hand blindly; but it was the muzzle of his horse that had touched his shoulder.  The girl was gone.

The Indian drums at Laramie thudded through the dark.  The great wolf in the breaks lifted his hoarse, raucous roar once more.  The wilderness was afoot or bedding down, according to its like.

CHAPTER XXVIII

WHEN A MAID MARRIES

Carson, Bridger and Jackson, now reunited after years, must pour additional libations to Auld Lang Syne at Laramie, so soon were off together.  The movers sat around their thrifty cooking fires outside the wagon corral.  Wingate and his wife were talking heatedly, she in her nervousness not knowing that she fumbled over and over in her fingers the heavy bit of rock which Molly had picked up and which was in her handkerchief when it was requisitioned by her mother to bathe her face just now.  After a time she tossed the nugget aside into the grass.  It was trodden by a hundred feet ere long.

But gold will not die.  In three weeks a prowling Gros Ventre squaw found it and carried it to the trader, Bordeaux, asking, “Shoog?”

“Non, non!” replied the Laramie trader.  “Pas de shoog!” But he looked curiously at the thing, so heavy.

“How, cola!” wheedled the squaw.  “Shoog!” She made the sign for sugar, her finger from her palm to her lips.  Bordeaux tossed the thing into the tin can on the shelf and gave her what sugar would cover a spoon.

“Where?” He asked her, his fingers loosely shaken, meaning, “Where did you get it?”

The Gros Ventre lied to him like a lady, and told him, on the South Fork, on the Creek of Bitter Cherries—­near where Denver now is; and where placers once were.  That was hundreds of miles away.  The Gros Ventre woman had been there once in her wanderings and had seen some heavy metal.