“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.