I do not know why this thing should be so, but it was so.
"It is the mouth of hell," he said; "let us go down." And we went
down.
'And on the bottom there was a cabin, built by some man, of logs
which he had cast down from above. It was a very old cabin, for
men had died there alone at different times, and on pieces of
birch bark which were there we read their last words and their
curses.
'One had died of scurvy; another's partner had robbed him of his
last grub and powder and stolen away; a third had been mauled by
a baldface grizzly; a fourth had hunted for game and starved--and
so it went, and they had been loath to leave the gold, and had
died by the side of it in one way or another. And the worthless
gold they had gathered yellowed the floor of the cabin like in a
dream.
'But his soul was steady, and his head clear, this man I had led
thus far. "We have nothing to eat," he said, "and we will only
look upon this gold, and see whence it comes and how much there
be. Then we will go away quick, before it gets into our eyes and
steals away our judgment. And in this way we may return in the
end, with more grub, and possess it all." So we looked upon the
great vein, which cut the wall of the pit as a true vein should,
and we measured it, and traced it from above and below, and drove
the stakes of the claims and blazed the trees in token of our
rights.
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