THE ‘ARGONAUTS’ 3

They bade him lay it on the smith’s anvil and
strike it with a hammer. Finlayson, smiling
sceptically, did as he was told. The nuggets
flattened to a yellow leaf as fine and flexible
as silk. Finlayson took the nuggets at eleven
dollars an ounce and sent the gold down to
San Francisco, very doubtful what the real
value would prove. It proved sixteen dollars
to the ounce.

For seven or eight years afterwards rumours
kept floating in to the company’s forts of finds
of gold. Many of the company’s servants
drifted away to California in the wake of the
‘Forty-Niners,’ and the company found it
hard to keep its trappers from deserting all up
and down the Pacific Coast. The quest for
gold had become a sort of yellow-fever mad-
ness. Men flung certainty to the winds and
trekked recklessly to California, to Oregon, to
the hinterland of the country round Colville
and Okanagan. Yet nothing occurred to
cause any excitement in Victoria. There was
a short-lived flurry over the discovery in
Queen Charlotte Islands of a nugget valued
at six hundred dollars and a vein of gold-bear-
ing quartz. But the nugget was an isolated
freak; the quartz could not be worked at a
profit; and the movement suddenly died out.