Hotel

He nodded affirmatively. "Plenty did. Around Yellowknife, Great Slave Lake. There were discoveries there from the 1890s to a stampede in 1945.

Mostly, though, the country was too tough to mine and take it out."

Christine said, "It must have been a hard life."

The little man coughed, then took a sip of water, smiling apologetically.

"I was tougher then. Though give the Shield half a chance, it'll kill you." He looked around the pleasantly appointed dining room, lighted by crystal chandeliers. "It seems a long way from here."

"You said that mostly it was too difficult to mine the gold. It wasn't always?"

"Not always. Some were luckier 'n others, though even for them things 'd go wrong. Maybe it's part because the Shield and the Barren Lands do strange things to people. Some you think 'd be strong - and not just in body either - they turn out to be the weak ones. And some you'd trust with your life, you discover you can't. Then there's the other way around. One time I remember . . ." He stopped as the head waiter placed a salver on the table with their bill.

She urged, "Go on."

"It's kind of a long story, Christine." He turned over the bill, inspecting it.

"I'd like to hear," Christine said, and meant it. As time went on, she thought, she liked this modest little man more and more.

He looked up and there seemed to be amusement in his eyes. He glanced across the room at the head waiter, then back toward Christine. Abruptly, he took out a pencil and signed the bill.

"It was in '36," the little man began, "around the time that one of the last Yellowknife stampedes was getting started. I was prospecting near the shore of Great Slave Lake. Had a partner then. Name of Hymie Eckstein. Hymie'd come from Ohio. He'd been in the garment trade, a used-car salesman, lot of other things, I guess. He was pushy and a fast talker. But he had a way of making people like him. I guess you'd call it charm. When he got to Yellowknife he had a little money. I was broke. Hymie grubstaked the two of us."

Albert Wells took a sip of water, pensively.

"Hymie'd never seen a snowshoe, never heard of permafrost, couldn't tell schist from quartz. From the beginning, though, we got along well. And we made out.

"We'd been out a month, maybe two. On the Shield you lose all track of time. Then one day, near the mouth of the Yellowknife River, the two of us sat down to roll our cigarettes. Sitting there, the way prospectors do, I chipped away at some gossam - that's oxidized rock, Christine, and slipped a piece or two in my pocket. Later, by the lakeshore, I panned the rock. You could have shoved me over when it showed good coarse gold."

"When it really happens," Christine said, "it must seem the most exciting thing in the world."

"Maybe there are other things excite you more. If there are, they never came my way. Well, we rushed back to the place I'd chipped the rock and we covered it with moss. Two days later, we found the ground had already been staked. I guess it was the darnedest blow either of us ever had.

Turned out, a Toronto prospector 'd done the staking. He'd been out the year before, then gone back east, not knowing what he had. Under Territories law, if he didn't work the claim, his rights'd run out a year from recording."

"How long away was that?"

"We made our find in June. If things stayed the way they were, the land'd come clear the last day in September."

"Couldn't you keep quiet, and just wait?"

"We aimed at that. Except it wasn't so easy. For one thing, the find we'd made was right in line with a producing mine an' there were other prospectors, like ourselves, working the same country. For another, Hymie and me 'd run clean out of money and food."

Albert Wells beckoned a passing waiter. "I reckon I'll have more coffee after all." He asked Christine, "How about you?"

She shook her head. "No thank you. Don't stop. I want to hear the rest."

How strange, she thought, that the kind of epic adventure which people dreamed about should have happened to someone as apparently ordinary as the little man from Montreal.

"Well, Christine, I reckon the next three months were the longest any two men lived. Maybe the hardest. We existed. On fish, some bits of plants.

Near the end I was thinner'n a twig and my legs were black with scurvy.

Had this bronchitis and phlebitis too. Hymie wasn't a whole lot better, but he never complained and I got to like him more."

The coffee arrived and Christine waited.

"Finally it got to the last day of September. We'd heard through Yellowknife that when the first claim ran out, there'd be others try to move in, so we didn't take chances. We had our stakes ready. Right after midnight we rammed 'em home. I remember - it was a pitch-black night, snowing hard and blowing a gale."

His hands went around the coffee cup as they had before.