A year later a prospector was slowly pushing his way through the wilderness some seventy miles northward of St. Marys. It was springtime and the air was mild, but, while the ridges were already bare, great banks of snow still lay in the deep folds of the hills where the sun but touched them at noon hour. The endless lacework of naked branches now began to be feathered with tender green, and everywhere the bush was alive with the voices of wild things whose blood was stirred to mating by the soft caresses of the southerly wind. Thrusting through a patch of tangled undergrowth, the man reached higher ground and, advancing to a hillock, stood with his hat off and his brown face steaming with sweat.

He was of middle age, with short, sturdy frame, a broad face of pale, copper color, swarthy black brows and a small, stringy mustache. His feet were enclosed in shoepacks, soggy with water, and he was otherwise clad in the nondescript fashion of old bushmen. Around his shoulders were strung a compass, binoculars and map case, and at his belt dangled a small ax and a prospector's hammer pick. He was torn, scratched, and in a general way disheveled, but the clear glance of the black eyes and the easy grace of his pose proclaimed him fit for action.

He stood for some time while his keen glance searched the country ahead—a frozen sea in which congealed billows of rock thrust up their tumbled heads in a gigantic confusion. Here and there were more definite ridges that took a general trend, but for the most part it was a chaos of rock and timber, slope and swamp, the refuse from the construction of a more attractive country which had been assembled elsewhere.

Presently Fisette took out his compass, balanced it in the palm of his sinewy hand and glanced at the needle. As he glanced, this filament of soft iron began to tremble and swing. He stood fascinated. Slowly at first, but gradually with more active and jerky motions, the thing became possessed. It vibrated as though in doubt, then moved off in continued restlessness. Not by any means could Fisette end these vagaries. After a little, a slow light grew in his eyes, his strong face broadened into a smile and, snapping back the compass lid, he strode down hill.

A quarter of an hour later he was chipping the edges of a ridge of blackish-gray rock from which he had stripped great rolls of damp, green moss. The rock lay exposed and glistening, its polished surface scarred with the scratches of hard stones that once lay embedded in the feet of prehistoric glaciers, but Fisette, screwing his bushy brows over a tiny magnifying glass and peering at the sparkling fragments in his palm and balancing their weight, cared nothing for glaciers. He only knew he had found that which he had been seeking for more than a year.

There is no measuring device for joy, and no foot-rule one can lay on emotion, but it is questionable if to the heart of any man comes greater lightness than to that of the one who by stress and endurance in the wilderness, upturns the treasure he has so arduously sought. These moments are few and rapt and precious, and they glowed in the slow brain of the half-breed Fisette as nothing else had ever glowed. It was true that he stood to do well and earn independence out of this discovery, but he was conscious at the instant of a reward greater than ease and comfort and money to spend. He had backed himself, single-handed, against the wilderness, and he had won. Again he unrolled from a strip of caribou skin the fragment of ore Clark had given him—the fragment he was to match—and laid it amongst the fresh chippings at his feet. Only by size and shape could he distinguish it.

Now it may be assumed that Fisette forthwith threw his tattered hat into the air and gave way to noisy manifestations of joy. He did nothing of the kind, for in his hairy breast were combined the practical side of his French father and the noiseless secrecy of an Indian mother. There was much to be done, and he went about it with voiceless determination. First of all he blazed a jack pine whose knotted roots grasped nakedly at the ridge, and marked it boldly with his name and the number of his prospecting license and the date, which latter, he remembered contentedly, was the birthday of his youngest child.

This accomplished, he disappeared in the bush and two hours later reappeared bending forward under a pack strap whose broad center strained against his swarthy forehead. And in the pack were a small shed tent and his camping outfit. Making a tiny, smokeless fire of dry wood, he cooked and ate, stopping now and again to listen intently. But all he heard was the chuckle of a hidden spring and the insolent familiarity of a blue jay, which, perched in a branch immediately above, eyed the prospector's frying pan with a bright inquiring gaze.

By noon of the second day Fisette had blazed the enclosing boundaries of three claims, along the middle of which for three quarters of a mile he had traced the ridge of ore, and when corner posts were in, he shouldered his pack and, stepping quietly to the river where his canoe was hidden three miles away, began his homeward journey. He paddled easily, squatting in the middle like his ancestors, and feeling a new pleasure in the steady pressure of his noiseless blade. He did not experience any particular sense of triumph, but when, six hours afterward, he saw the glint of Lake Superior around a bend in the river he laughed softly to himself.