In another few minutes he waded ashore, and drew the butt of the log out upon the shingle before he turned to glance ruefully at the sliding water.
"If I went back and plunged for it I might get that flour," he said.
"Still, I should have to go down the rapid with it, and I mightn't want it then." Dripping from the waist with snow water, he reslung his traps, glanced back at the sombre bush behind him and then plunged into that ahead, while the dusk was closing in when he stood panting amidst the stumps of smaller trees.

The mark of the axe was on them, and somebody had piled up a mound of rock and stones.

Alton drew in a long breath and shook off his burden.
"Jimmy's claim," he said.

"It may mean--most anything--to me." Then, though his pulses throbbed, and he could feel his blood tingling, he fell to work systematically, groping about the excavation the dead man had made where the snowslide had rent apart the forest and scored out the rock for him.

Here and there he smashed a fragment of it with the back of the axe, or picked up a discoloured stone of unusual gravity and compared it with the pieces he took out of a little bag, until at last he stood up stiffly and flung his head back.
All round him the forest rose dim and sombre, flinging back the roar of the rapid in long pulsations of sound, and its solitude was not lessened by the presence of the wet and weary man standing so still that his outline was scarcely perceptible against the trunks behind him.