Page:Hendryx--Connie Morgan with the Mounted.djvu/215



The tillicums of the gold country still speak with bated breath of the "Demon's Heart," the great nugget that left its trail of ill-luck, misfortune, and death, from the Black Fork Kaskana to Dawson, and from Dawson to the divide—and beyond. The tillicums wonder how far beyond.

About hot stoves in far-away trading posts men ask each other if the great nugget is still working its harm among men. Has it found its way to the mint and been stamped into coins? Or, to the jeweler, and been fashioned into costly rings to encircle fair fingers? And if so, have the crucibles and the melting pots removed the bane? Or, will misfortune forever dog the footsteps of the women who wear the rings, and the men who possess the coins, stamped from the gold of the "Demon's Heart"?

But of all the tillicums in the land of the peaks