“Of course ye’ll be comin’ back for it again,” said the girl slowly.

There was so much of hopeless disappointment at that prospect in her voice that Fleming laughed outright.  “I’m afraid I shall, for I value the ring very much,” he said.

The girl handed him the pan.  “It’s our bread pan,” she said.

It might have been anything, for it was by no means new; indeed, it was battered on one side and the bottom seemed to have been broken; but it would serve, and Fleming was anxious to be off.  “Thank you,” he said briefly, and turned away.  The hound barked again as he passed; he heard the girl say, “Shut your head, Tige!” and saw her turn back into the kitchen, still holding the ring before the sunbonnet.

When he reached the woods, he attacked the outcrop he had noticed, and detached with his hands and the aid of a sharp rock enough of the loose soil to fill the pan.  This he took to the spring, and, lowering the pan in the pool, began to wash out its contents with the centrifugal movement of the experienced prospector.  The saturated red soil overflowed the brim with that liquid ooze known as “slumgullion,” and turned the crystal pool to the color of blood until the soil was washed away.  Then the smaller stones were carefully removed and examined, and then another washing of the now nearly empty pan showed the fine black sand covering the bottom.  This was in turn as gently washed away.

Alas! the clean pan showed only one or two minute glistening yellow scales, like pinheads, adhering from their specific gravity to the bottom; gold, indeed, but merely enough to indicate “the color,” and common to ordinary prospecting in his own locality.

He tried another panful with the same result.  He became aware that the pan was leaky, and that infinite care alone prevented the bottom from falling out during the washing.  Still it was an experiment, and the result a failure.

Fleming was too old a prospector to take his disappointment seriously.  Indeed, it was characteristic of that performance and that period that failure left neither hopelessness nor loss of faith behind it; the prospector had simply miscalculated the exact locality, and was equally as ready to try his luck again.  But Fleming thought it high time to return to his own mining work in camp, and at once set off to return the pan to its girlish owner and recover his ring.

As he approached the cabin again, he heard the sound of singing.  It was evidently the girl’s voice, uplifted in what seemed to be a fragment of some negro camp-meeting hymn:—­

     “Dar was a poor man and his name it was Lazarum,
     Lord bress de Lamb—­glory hallelugerum! 
     Lord bress de Lamb!”

The first two lines had a brisk movement, accented apparently by the clapping of hands or the beating of a tin pan, but the refrain, “Lord bress de Lamb,” was drawn out in a lugubrious chant of infinite tenuity.