Page:Hendryx--Connie Morgan with the Mounted.djvu/220

202 Anderson was trappin' an' prospectin', an' he had a cabin on Black Fork Kaskana. My camp was ten miles above his'n. One day I paddles down to see about us runnin' in our winter's grub by canoe before the freeze-up. An' when I gets to his cabin there ain't no smoke comin' out the chimbly, an' I shoves open the door, an' there lays Hans Anderson in his bunk, an' a ragin' fever was on him, an' he talks wild an' delirious about a big nugget streaked with red. I done what I know'd how for him, an' bye 'n' bye he quieted down. 'Twas then he told me about the Injun. 'There's a curse,' he says, 'on the gold from a dead man's hand!' An' he showed me the nugget. 'It's got me,' he says, 'an' it'll get any one that owns it.' An' he wanted me to take it up to the crick an' bury it with the Injun. But I wouldn't, an' that night Hans Anderson died. I wanted him to give me the nugget, but he said it would bring me bad luck. An' he died with his fingers a-grippin' it tight.

"Him a-tellin' me that-a-way, 'bout takin' it from the hand of the dead Injun, an' then him a-dyin' like he done, when he was well an' hearty the last time I seen him, a few days before, it give me the creeps, an' had me plumb scairt of the red-