When a Maid Marries

Carson, Bridger and Jackson, now reunited after years, must pour
additional libations to Auld Lang Syne at Laramie, so soon were off
together. The movers sat around their thrifty cooking fires outside the
wagon corral. Wingate and his wife were talking heatedly, she in her
nervousness not knowing that she fumbled over and over in her fingers
the heavy bit of rock which Molly had picked up and which was in her
handkerchief when it was requisitioned by her mother to bathe her face
just now. After a time she tossed the nugget aside into the grass. It
was trodden by a hundred feet ere long.

But gold will not die. In three weeks a prowling Gros Ventre squaw found
it and carried it to the trader, Bordeaux, asking, "Shoog?"

"Non, non!" replied the Laramie trader. "Pas de shoog!" But he looked
curiously at the thing, so heavy.

"How, cola!" wheedled the squaw. "Shoog!" She made the sign for sugar,
her finger from her palm to her lips. Bordeaux tossed the thing into the
tin can on the shelf and gave her what sugar would cover a spoon.

"Where?" He asked her, his fingers loosely shaken, meaning, "Where did
you get it?"

The Gros Ventre lied to him like a lady, and told him, on the South
Fork, on the Creek of Bitter Cherries--near where Denver now is; and
where placers once were. That was hundreds of miles away. The Gros
Ventre woman had been there once in her wanderings and had seen some
heavy metal.