Youth is elastic, and Van was young. An hour of quiet riding restored him astoundingly. He bore no signs of fatigue that Beth could detect upon his face. Once more, as he had in the morning, he was riding ahead in the trail, apparently all but oblivious of the two anxious women in his charge.
They had wound far downward through a canyon, and now at length were emerging on a sagebrush slope that lowered to the valley. Van halted for Beth to ride to his side, and onward they continued together.
"I suppose you have friends to whom you are going in Goldite," he said, "—or at least there's someone you know."
"Yes," she answered, "my brother."
Van looked at her in his quizzical way, observing:
"I don't believe I know him."
Her glance was almost one of laughter.
"Why, how can you tell? You don't even know his name." She paused, then added quietly: "It's Glenmore Kent." She felt he had a right to know not only her brother's name, but also her own, if only for what he had done. "You might, of course, know him after all," she concluded. "He has quite a number of acquaintances."
"Kent," said Van. To himself it was "Beth Kent" he was saying. "No, guess not. No such luck, but I hope you'll find him in the camp."
"Do you think I may not?" She was just a trifle startled by the possibility.
He was grave for once.
"Men come and go in a mining town, where everyone's unduly excited. If he isn't on deck, then have you no one else? Have you any alternative plan?"
"Why, no," she confessed, her alarm increasing, "not unless Mr. Bostwick has arrived and arranged our accommodations."
"I wouldn't count on Searle," drawled Van significantly. "He may have to walk."
"Not across the awful desert?"
"If he goes around he'll be longer."
"Why—but——" she gasped, "there is nothing to eat—no water—there isn't anything on the desert, is there?—anywhere?"
He was looking intently into the deep brown depths of her eyes as he answered:
"There's so little to eat that the chipmunks have to fetch in their lunches."
Beth continued to gaze upon him. If she noted the lights of laughter lying soberly subdued in his eyes, she also discerned something more, that affected her oddly. Despite the horseman's treatment of her escort—a treatment she confessed he had partially deserved—and despite the lightness of his speeches, she felt certain of the depth of his nature, convinced of the genuine earnestness of his purposes—the honesty and worth of his friendship.
She knew she was tremendously indebted for all he had done and was doing, but aside from all that, in her heart of hearts she admired bravery, courage, and a dash of boldness more than anything else in the world. She was not yet certain, however, whether the man at her side was brave or merely reckless, courageous, or indifferent to danger, bold or merely audacious. She knew nothing about him whatsoever, nothing except he must be tired, lame, and bruised from exertions undertaken in her behalf. It had been a long, long day. She felt as if they had known each other always—and had always been friends.
Her mind went back to the morning as if to an era of the past. The thought of the convicts who had captured Bostwick aroused new apprehensions in her breast, though not for the man with the car. Someway Searle seemed strangely far away and dimmed in her regard. She was thinking of what she had overheard, back there at the Monte Cristo mine.
"This has been a trying day," she said, apparently ignoring Van's last observation. "You have taken a great deal of trouble for—for us—and we appreciate it fully."
Van said gravely: "Taking trouble is the only fun I have."
"You laugh at everything," she answered, "but isn't it really a serious thing—a menace to everyone—having those convicts out of prison?"
"It isn't going to be a knitting-bee, rounding them up," Van admitted. "And meantime they're going to be exacting of everyone they meet."
She looked at him half seriously, but altogether brightly.
"And what if they chance to meet you?"
"Oh, we'd exchange courtesies, I reckon."
She had no intention of confessing how much she had overheard, but she was tremendously interested—almost fearful for the man's safety, she hardly dared ask herself why. She approached her subject artfully.
"Do you know them, then?"
"Well, yes, the leader—slightly," he answered. "I sent him up for murder, stealing cattle, and robbing sluices. He was too annoying to have around."
"Oh! Then won't he feel ugly, resentful?" she inquired earnestly. "Won't he try to hunt you up—and pay you back?"
Van regarded her calmly.
"He told me to expect my pay—if ever he escaped—and he's doubtless got his check-book along."
"His check-book?"
"Colt—forty-four," Van drawled by way of explanation.
She turned a trifle pale.
"He'd shoot you on sight?"
"If he sighted me first."
Her breath came hard. She realized that the quiet-seeming horseman at her side would kill a fellow-being—this convict, at least—as readily as he might destroy a snake.
"How long ago did you put him in jail?" she inquired.
"Four years ago this summer."
"Have you always lived here—out West?"
"I've lived every day I've been here," he answered evasively. "Do I look like a native?"
She laughed. "Oh, I don't know. We came here straight from New York, a week ago, Elsa and I. Mr. Bostwick joined us two days later. I really know nothing of the country at all."
"New York," he said, and relapsed into silent meditation. How far away seemed old New Amsterdam! How long seemed the brief six years since he had started forth with his youthful health, his strength, determination, boyish dreams, and small inheritance to build up a fortune in the West! What a mixture of sunshine and failure it had been! What glittering hopes had lured him hither and yon in the mountains, where each great gateway of adventure had charged its heavy toll!
He had lost practically all of his money; he had gained his all of manhood. He had suffered privation and hardship; he had known the vast comfort of friends—true friends, as certain as the very heart in his breast to serve him to the end.
Like a panoramic dream he beheld a swift procession of mine-and-cattle scenes troop past for swift review. He lived again whole months of nights spent out alone beneath the sky, with the snow and the wind hurled down upon him from a merciless firmament of bleakness. Once more he stumbled blindly forward in the desert—he and Gettysburg—perishing for water, giving up their liquid souls to the horribly naked and insatiate sun. Again he toiled in the shaft of a mine till his back felt like a crackly thing of glass with each aching fissure going deeper.
Once more the gold goddess beckoned with her smile, and fortune was there, almost in reach—the fortune that he and his partners had sought so doggedly, so patiently—the fortune for which they had starved and delved and suffered—only to see it vanish in the air as the sunshine will vanish from a peak.
Old hopes, like ghosts, went skulking by, vain charlatans, ashamed. But friendships stood about in every scene—bright presences that cast a roseate glow on all the tribulations of his life. And it seemed as if a failure here was half a failure only, after all. It had not robbed him either of his youth, his strength, or a certain boyish credulity and trust in all his kind. He still believed he should win his golden goal, and he loved the land that had tried him.
His last, his biggest venture, the Monte Cristo mine was, however, gone—everything sold to meet the company debts. Nevertheless, he had once more purchased a claim, with all but his very last dollar in the world, and he and his partners would soon be on the ground, assaulting the stubborn adamant with powder, pick, and drill, in the fever of the miner's ceaseless dream.
To-day, as he rode beside the girl, he wondered at it all—why he had labored so persistently. The faint, far-off shadow of a sweetheart, long since left behind, failed to supply him a motive. She had grown impatient, listened to a suitor more tangible than Van's absent self, and so, blamelessly, had faded from his scheme of hopes, leaving no more than a fragrance in his thoughts, with certainly no bitterness or anger.
"Old New York," he repeated, at the end of his reverie, and meeting once more the steady brown eyes of the girl with whom the fates had thrown him, he fetched up promptly with the present.
"How long has your brother been out here in Goldite?"
"About a month," she answered. "He's been in the West for nearly a year, and wrote Mr. Bostwick to come."
"Mr. Bostwick is doubtless a very particular friend of your family."
"Why, yes, he's my—— That is, hewas—he always has been a very particular friend—for several years," she faltered suddenly turning red. "We haven't any family, Glen and I—and he's my half brother only—but we're just like chums—-and that was why I wanted to come. I expect to surprise him. He doesn't know I'm here."
Van was silent and she presently added:
"I hope you and Glen will be friends. I know how much he'll wish to thank you."
He looked at her gravely.
"I hope he won't. It's up to me to thank him."
They had come to a road at the level of the valley—a desert valley, treeless, grassless, gray, and desolate. The sun was rapidly nearing the rim of the mountains, as if to escape pursuit of a monstrous bank of clouds.
Van spurred his chestnut to a gallop, and the horses bearing the women responded with no further need of urging.
From Karrish to Goldite by the road was twenty-seven miles. There were fifteen mile of bottles by the way—all of them empty. A blind man with a nose for glass could have smelled out the trail unerringly across that desert stretch. Karrish was the nearest town for a very great distance around.
Over the road innumerable caravans were passing. Everything was rushing to Goldite. There were horsemen, hurried persons on foot, men in carriages and autos, twenty-horse freight teams, and men on tiny burros. Nearly all were shedding bottles as they went. A waterless land is not necessarily devoid of all manner of moisture.
A dozen of the slowly laboring freight outfits were passed by Van and his two companions. What engines of toil they represented! The ten pairs of sweating, straining animals seemed almost like some giant caterpillar, harnessed to a burden on wheels. They always dragged three wagons, two of which were huge gray hulks, incredibly heavy with giant-powder, canned goods, bottled goods, picks, shovels, bedding, hay, great mining machinery, and house-hold articles. These wagons were hitched entrain. The third wagon, termed a "trailer," was small and loaded merely with provisions for the teamster and the team. The whole thing, from end to end, beat up a stifling cloud of dust.
The sun went down while Beth, Van, and Elsa were still five miles from their goal. They rode as rapidly as possible. The horses, however, were jaded, and the way was slightly up grade. The twilight was brief. It descended abruptly from the western bank of clouds, by now as thick and dark as mud. Afar off shone the first faint light of the gold-camp to which the three were riding. This glimmering ray was two miles out from the center of town. Goldite was spread in a circle four miles wide, and the most of it was isolated tents.
The darkness shut down like a pall. A vivid, vicious bolt of lightning—a fiery serpent, overcharged with might—struck down upon the mountain tops, pouring liquid flame upon the rocks. A sweeping gust of wind came raging down upon the town, hurling dust and gravel on the travelers.
Van rode ahead like a spirit of the storm. He knew the need for haste. Beth simply let her pony go. She was cramped and far too wearied for effort.
They were galloping now past the outskirts of the camp, the many scattered tents of the men who were living on their claims. All the world was a land of claims, staked off with tall white posts, like ghosts in the vanishing light. Ahead, a multitude of lights had suddenly broken on the travelers' vision, like a nearby constellation of stars.
They rode into all of it, blazing lights, eager crowds upon the streets, noise of atrocious music from the brilliant saloons, and rush of wind and dust, not a minute too soon. They had barely alighted and surrendered their horses to a friend of Van's when the rain from the hilltops swooped upon the camp in a fury that seemed like an elemental threat to sweep all the place, with its follies, hopes, and woes, its excitements, lawlessness, and struggles, from the face of the barren desert world.
Beth and her maid were lame and numb. Van could only hustle them inside a grocery-and-hardware store to save them from a drenching. The store was separated from a gambling-hall saloon by the flimsiest board partition. Odors of alcohol, confusion of voices, and calls of a gamester came unimpeded to the women's senses, together with some mighty bad singing, accompanied lustily by strains and groans pounded from a ghastly piano.
"Sit down," said Van, inverting a tub at the feet of the wondering women. "I'll see if I can rustle up your brother."
He went out in the rain, dived impartially into the first of the crowded saloons, was somewhat hilariously greeted by a score of convivial fellows, found no one who knew of young Glen Kent, and proceeded on to the next.
The horseman was well and favorably known in all directions. He was eagerly cornered wheresoever he appeared by a lot of fellows who were friends to little purpose, in an actual test. However, he clung to his mission with commendable tenacity of purpose, and kept upon his way. Thus he discovered at length, when he visited the bank—an institution that rarely closed before ten o'clock in the evening—that Kent had been gone for the past two weeks, no one knew where, but somewhere out south, with a party.
There was nothing to do after that but to look for fit apartments for the gently reared girl and her maid. Hunting a needle in the ocean would have been a somewhat similar task. Van went at once at the business, with his customary spirit. He was presently informed there was nothing resembling a room or a bed to be had in all the place. A hundred men would walk the streets or sleep in chairs that night. The one apartment suitable for two lone women to occupy had been secured the previous day by "Plunger" Trask, an Eastern young man who would bet that grass was not green.
Van searched for Trask and found him "cashing in" a lot of assorted chips, representing his winnings at a faro game at which he had been "bucking."
"Hello, there, Van," he said familiarly as the horseman touched him on the shoulder. "Come and have a drink."
"My teeth are floating now from drink," said Van, "but I'll take something else if you say so. I want your apartments for the night."
"Say, wire me!" answered the plunger. "That's the cutest little bunch of nerve I ever saw off the Bowery! How much money have you got in your clothes?"
"About forty-five dollars," said Van. "Is it good?"
"Not as a price, but O.K. in a flip," said Trask, with an itch for schemes of chance. "I'll throw you the dice, my room against your forty-five—and the devil take your luck if you win!"
Van agreed. They borrowed a box of dice, threw three times apiece—and the horseman paid over his money.
"There you are, old man," said the plunger cheerfully. "Satisfied, I hope."
"Not quite," said Van. "I'll owe you forty-five more and throw you again."
"Right ho!" responded Trask. "Go as far as you like."
They shook again. Van lost as before. He borrowed again, undiscouraged. For the third time they cast the little cubes of uncertainty and this time Van actually won. The room was his to dispose of as he pleased. It had cost him ninety dollars for the night.
In his pocket he had cautiously retained a little money—seven and one-half dollars, to be accurate. He returned to Beth, informed her of all he had discovered concerning her brother, took herself and Elsa to dine in the camp's one presentable restaurant, paid nearly seven dollars for the meal, and gave what remained to the waiter.
Then Beth, who had never in her life been so utterly exhausted, resigned herself to Elsa's care, bade Van good-night, and left him standing in the rain before the door, gallant, and smiling to the end.
Goldite, by the light of day, presented a wonderful spectacle. It was a mining camp positively crystallizing into being before the very eyes of all beholders. It was nearly all tents and canvas structures—a heterogeneous mixture of incompleteness and modernity to which the telegraph wires had already been strung from the outside world. It had no fair supply of water, but it did have a newspaper, issued once a week.
A dozen new buildings, flimsy, cheap affairs, were growing like toadstools, day and night. Several brick buildings, and shacks of mud, were rising side by side. Everywhere the scene was one of crowds, activity, and hurry. Thousands of men were in the one straight street, a roughly dressed, excited throng, gold-bitten, eager, and open-handed. Hundreds of mules and horses, a few bewildered cows, herds of great wagons, buggies, heaps of household goods, and trunks, with fortifications of baled hay and grain, were crowded into two great corrals, where dusty teamsters hastened hotly about, amidst heaps of dusty harness, sacks of precious ore and the feed troughs for the beasts.
Beth had slept profoundly, despite the all-night plague of noises, penetrating vividly through the shell-like walls of the house. She was out with Elsa at an early hour, amazingly refreshed and absorbingly interested in all she heard and saw. The sky was clear, but a chill wind blew down from the mountains, flapping canvas walls in all directions.
The building wherein the women had rested was a wooden lodging house, set barely back from the one business street of the camp. Next door was a small, squat domicile constructed of bottles and mud. The bottles were laid in the "mortar" with their ends protruding. Near by, at the rear of a prosperous saloon, was a pyramid of empty bottles, fully ten feet high—enough to build a little church.
Drawn onward by the novelty of all the scene, Beth crossed the main street—already teeming with horses, wagons, and men—and proceeded over towards a barren hill, followed demurely by her maid. The hill was like a torn-up battlefield, trenched, and piled with earthworks of defense, for man the impetuous had already flung up great gray dumps of rock, broken and wrenched from the bulk of the slope, where he quested for gleaming yellow metal. He had ripped out the adamant—the matrix of the gold—for as far as Beth could see. Like ant-heaps of tremendous dimensions stood these monuments of toil—rock-writings, telling of the heat and desire, the madness of man to be rich.
The world about was one of rocks and treeless ridges, spewed from some vast volcanic forge of ages past. It was all a hard, gray, adamantine world, unlovely and severe—a huge old gold furnace, minus heat or fire, lying neglected in a universe of mountains that might have been a workshop in the ancient days when Titans wrought their arts upon the earth.
Beth gazed upon it all in wonder not unmingled with awe. What a place it was for man to live and wage his puny battles! Yet the fever of all of it, rising in her veins, made her eager already to partake of the dream, the excitement that made mere gold-slaves of the men who had come here compelling this forbidding place to yield up some measure of comfort and become in a manner their home.
Van, in the meanwhile, having spent the time till midnight on his feet, and the small hours asleep on a bale of hay, was early abroad, engaged in various directions. He first proceeded to the largest general store in the camp and ordered a generous bill of supplies to be sent to his newest claim. Next he arranged with a friendly teamster for the prompt return of the two borrowed horses on which Beth and her maid had come to camp. Then, on his way to an assayer's office, where samples of rock from the claim in question had been left for the test of fire, he encountered a homely, little, dried-up woman who was scooting about from store to store with astonishing celerity of motion.
"Tottering angels!" said he. "Mrs. Dick!"
"Hello—just a minute," said the lively little woman, and she dived inside the newest building and was out almost immediately with a great sack of plunder that she jerked about with most diverting energy.
"Here, fetch this down to the house," she demanded imperiously. "What's the good of my finding you here in Goldite if you don't do nothing for your country?"
Van shouldered the sack.
"What are you doing here anyhow?" said he, "—up before breakfast and busy as a hen scratching for one chicken."
"Come on," she answered, starting briskly towards a new white building, off the main thoroughfare, eastward. "I live here—start my boarding-house today. I'm going to get rich. Every room's furnished and every bed wanted as fast as I can make 'em up. Have you had your breakfast?"
"Say, you're my Indian," answered Van. "I've got you two customers already. You've got to take them in and give them your best if you turn someone else inside out to do it."
Mrs. Dick paused suddenly.
"Bronson Van Buren! You're stuck on some woman at last!"
"At last?" said Van. "Haven't I always been stuck after you?"
Mrs. Dick resumed her brisk locomotion.
"Snakes alive!" she concluded explosively. "She's respectable, of course? But you said two. Now see here, Van, no Mormon games with me!"
"Hermaid—it's her maid that's with her," Van explained. "Don't jump down my throat till I grease it."
"Her maid!" Mrs. Dick said no more as to that. The way she said it was enough. They had come to the door of her newly finished house, a clean, home-like place from which a fragrance of preparing breakfast flowed like a ravishing nectar. "Where are they now?" she demanded impatiently. "Wherever they are it ain't fit for a horse! Why don't you go and fetch 'em?"
Van put the bag inside the door, then his hands on Mrs. Dick's shoulders.
"I'll bet your mother was a little red firecracker and your father a bottle of seltzer," he said. Then off he went for Beth.
She was not, of course, at "home" when he arrived at the place he had found the previous evening. Disturbed for a moment by her absence, he presently discerned her, off there westward on the hill from which she was making a survey of the camp.
Three minutes after he was climbing up the slope and she turned and looked downward upon him.
"By heavens!" he said beneath his breath, "—what beauty!"
The breeze was molding her dress upon her rounded form till she seemed like the statue of a goddess—a goddess of freedom, loveliness, and joy, sculptured in the living flesh—a figure vibrant with glowing health and youth, startlingly set in the desert's gray austerity. With the sunlight flinging its gold and riches upon her, what a marvel of color she presented!—such creamy white and changing rose-tints in her cheeks—such a wonderful brown in her hair and eyes—such crimson of lips that parted in a smile over even little jewels of teeth! And she smiled on the horseman, tall, and active, coming to find her on the hill.
"Good morning!" she cried. "Oh, isn't it wonderful—so big, and bare, andclean!"
Van smiled.
"It's a hungry-looking country to me—looks as if it has eaten all the trees. If it makes you think of breakfast, or just plain coffee and rolls, I've found a place I hope you'll like, with a friend I didn't know was here."
"You are very kind, I'm sure," she said. "I'm afraid we're a great deal of trouble."
"That's what women were made for," he answered her frankly, a bright, dancing light in his eyes. "They couldn't help it if they would, and I guess they wouldn't if they could."
"Oh, indeed?" She shot him a quick glance, half a challenge. "Iguessif you don't mind we won't go to the place you've found, for breakfast, this morning."
"You'd better guess again," he answered, and taking her arm, in a masterful way that bereft her of the power of speech or resistance, he marched her briskly down the slope and straight towards Mrs. Dick's.
"Thank your stars you've struck a place like this," he said. "If you don't I'll have to thank them for you."
"Perhaps I ought to thank you first," she ventured smilingly. It would have seemed absurd to resent his boyish ways.
"You may," he said, "when I get to be one of your stars."
"Oh, really? Why defer mere thanksindefinitely?"
"It won't be indefinitely, and besides, thanks will keep—and breakfast won't."
He entered the house, with Beth and her maid humbly trailing at his heels. Mrs. Dick came bustling from the kitchen like a busy little ant. Van introduced his charges briefly. Mrs. Dick shook hands with them both.
"Well!" she said, "I like you after all! And it's lucky I do, for if I didn't I don't know's I should take you or not, even if Van did say I had to."
Van took her by the shoulders and shook her boyishly.
"You'd take a stick of dynamite and a house afire, both in one hand, if I said so," he announced. "Now don't get hostile."
"Well—I s'pose I would," agreed Mrs. Dick. She added to Beth: "Ain't he the dickens and all? Just regular brute strength. Come right upstairs till I show you where you're put. I've turned off two men to let you have the best room in the house."
Beth had to smile. She had never felt so helpless in her life—or so amused. She followed Mrs. Dick obediently, finding the two-bed room above to be a bright, new-smelling apartment of acceptable size and situation. In answer to a score of rapid-fire questions on the part of Mrs. Dick, she imparted as much as Van already knew concerning herself and her quest.
Mrs. Dick became her friend forthwith, then hastened downstairs to the kitchen. Van and Beth presently took breakfast together, while Elsa, with a borrowed needle and thread, was busied with some minor repairing of garments roughly used the day before. Other boarders and lodgers of the house had already eaten and gone, to resume their swirl in the maelstrom of the camp.
For a time the two thus left alone in the dining-room appeased their appetites in silence. Van watched the face of the girl for a time and finally spoke.
"I'll let you know whatever I hear about your brother, if there is any more to hear. Meantime you'll have to remain here and wait."
She was silent for a moment, reflecting on, the situation.
"You took my suitcase away from Mr. Bostwick, you'll remember," she said, "and left it where we got the horses."
"It will be here to-day," he answered. "I arranged for that with Dave."
"Oh. But of course you cannot tell when Mr. Bostwick may appear."
"His movements couldn't be arranged so conveniently, otherwise he wouldn't appear at all."
She glanced at him, startled.
"Not come at all? But I need him! Besides, he's my—— I expect him to go and find my brother. And the trunk checks are all in his pocket—wait!—no they're not, they're in my suitcase after all."
"You're in luck," he assured her blandly, "for Searle has doubtless lost all his pockets."
"Lost his pockets?" she echoed. "Perhaps you mean the convicts took them—took his clothing—everything he had."
"Everything except his pleasant manner," Van agreed. "They have plenty of that of their own."
She was lost for a moment in reflection.
"Poor Searle! Poor Mr. Bostwick!"
Van drank the last of his coffee.
"Was Searle the only man you knew in all New York?"
She colored. "Certainly not. Of course not. Why do you ask such a question?"
"I was trying to understand the situation, but I give it up." He looked in her eyes with mock gravity, and she colored.
She understood precisely what he meant—the situation between herself and Bostwick, to whom, she feared, she had half confessed herself engaged. She started three times to make a reply, but halted each answer for a better.
"You don't like Mr. Bostwick," she finally observed.
Van told her gravely: "I like him like the old woman kept tavern."
She could not entirely repress a smile.
"And how did she keep it—the tavern?"
"Like hell," said Van. He rose to go, adding; "You like him about that way yourself—since yesterday."
Her eyes had been sparkling, but now they snapped.
"Why—how can you speak so rudely? You know that isn't true! You know I like—admire Mr. Bost—— You haven't any right to say a thing like that—no matter what you may have done for me!"
She too had risen. She faced him glowingly.
He suddenly took both her hands and held them in a firm, warm clasp from which there could be no escape.
"Beth," he said audaciously, "you are never going to marry that man."
She was struggling vainly to be free. Her face was crimson.
"Let me go!" she demanded. "Mr. Van—you let me go! I don't see how you dare to say a thing like that. I don't know why——"
"You can't marry Searle," he interrupted, "because you are going to marry me."
He raised her hands to his lips and kissed them both.
"Be back by and by," he added, and off he went, through the kitchen, leaving Beth by the table speechless, burning and confused, with a hundred wild emotions in her heart.
He continued out at the rear of the place, where little Mrs. Dick was valiantly tugging at two large buckets of water. He relieved her of the burden.
"Say, Priscilla," he drawled, "if a smoke-faced Easterner comes around here while I'm gone, looking for—you know—Miss Kent, remember he can't have a room in your house if he offers a million and walks on his hands and prays in thirteen languages."
Little Mrs. Dick glanced up at him shrewdly.
"Have you got it as bad as that? Snakes alive! All right, I guess I'll remember."
"Be good," said Van, and off he went to the assayer's shop for which he had started before.
The assayer glanced up briefly. He was busy at a bucking-board, where, with energetic application of a very heavy weight, on the end of a handle, he was grinding up a lot of dusty ore.
"Greeting, Van," said he. "Come in."
Van shook his outstretched hand.
"I thought I'd like to see those results," he said, "—that rock I fetched you last, remember? You thought you could finish the batch last week. Gold rock from the 'See Saw' claim that I bought three weeks ago."
"Yes, oh yes. Now what did I do with—— Finished 'em up and put 'em away somewhere," said the assayer, dusting his hands and moving towards his desk. "Such a lot of stuff's been coming in—here they are, I reckon." He drew a half dozen small printed forms from a cavity in the desk, glanced them over briefly and handed the lot to Van. "Nothing doing. Pretty good rock for building purposes."
"Nothing doing?" echoed Van incredulously, staring at the assay records which showed in merciless bluntness that six different samples of reputed ore had proved to be absolutely worthless. "The samples you assayed first showed from ten to one hundred and fifty dollars to the ton, in gold."
"What's that got to do with this?" inquired the master of acids and fire. "You don't mean to say——"
"Do with it, man? It all came out of the same identical prospect," Van interrupted. "These were later samples than the others, that's all."
The assayer glanced over his shoulder at the hope-destroying slips.
"The 'See Saw' claim," he said perfunctorily. "You bought it, Van, who from?"
"From Selwyn Briggs."
"Sorry," said the assayer briefly. "H'm! That Briggs!"
"You don't mean—— It couldn't have been salted on me!" Van declared. "I took my own samples, broke down a new face purposely, sacked it all myself—and sealed the sacks. No one touched those sacks till you broke the seals in this office. He couldn't have salted me, Frank. What possible chance——"
The assayer went to a shelf, took down a small canvas bag, glanced at a mark that identified it as one in which samples of "See Saw" rock had arrived for the former assay, and turned it inside out.
"Once in a while I've heard of a cute one squirting a sharp syringe full of chloride of gold on worthless rock, through the meshes of the canvas, even after the samples were sealed," he imparted quietly. "This sack looks to me like some I've encountered before that were pretty rich in gold. I'll assay the cloth if you like."
Van took the sack in his hand, examined it silently, then glanced as before at his papers.
"Salted—by that lump of a Briggs!" His lip was curved in a mirthless smile. "I guess I've got it in the neck all right. These last samples tell the real story." He slapped the papers across his hand, then tore them up in tiny bits and threw them on the floor."
"Sorry, old man," said the assayer, as before. "Hope you didn't pay him much for the claim."
"Not much," said Van. "All I had—and some of it borrowed money."
The assayer puckered up his mouth.
"Briggs has skipped—gone East."
"I know. Well—all in a lifetime, I suppose. Pay you, Frank, when I can."
"That's all right," his friend assured him. "Forget it if you like."
Van started off, but returned.
"Say, Frank," he said, "don't hawk this around. It's bad enough for me to laugh at myself. I don't want the chorus joining in."
"I'm your clam," said Frank. "So long, and better luck!"
A man who lives by uncertainties has a singular habit of mind. He is ever lured forward by hopes and dreams that overlap each other as he goes. While the scheme in hand is proving hopeless, day by day, he grasps at another, just ahead, and draws himself onward towards the gilded goal, forgetful of the trickery of all those other schemes behind, that were equally bright in their day.
Van had relinquished all hold on the golden dream once dangled before him by the Monte Cristo mine, to lay strong hands on the promise vouchsafed by the "See Saw" claim which he had purchased. As he walked away from the assayer's shop he felt his hands absolutely empty. For the very first time in at least four years he had no blinding glitter before his vision to entice him to feverish endeavor. He was a dreamer with no dreams, a miner without a mine.
He felt chagrined, humiliated. After all his time spent here in the world's most prodigious laboratory of minerals, he had purchased a salted mine! A sharper man, that sad-faced, half-sick Selwyn Briggs, had actually trimmed him like this!
Salted! And he was broke. Well, what was the next thing to do? He thought of the fine large bill of goods, engaged for himself and partners to take to the "See Saw" claim. It made him smile. But he would not rescind the order—for a while. His partners, with his worldly goods, the Chinese cook and all the household, save Cayuse, would doubtless arrive by noon. He and they had to eat; they had to live. Also they had to mine, for they knew nothing else by way of occupation. They must somehow get hold of some sort of claim, and go on with their round of hopes and toil. They had never been so utterly bereft—so outcast by the goddess of fortune—since they had thrown their lots together.
He dreaded the thought of meeting various acquaintances here in camp—the friends to whom he had said he was going that day to the "See Saw" property, far over the Mahogany range, near the Indian reservation. He determined to go. Perhaps the shack and the shaft-house on the claim, with the windlass and tools included by Briggs in the bill of sale, might fetch a few odd dollars.
Slowly down the street he went to the hay-yard where his pony was stabled. He met a water man, halting on his rounds at the front of a neat canvas dwelling. The man had three large barrels on a wagon, each full of muddy, brackish water. A long piece of hose was thrust into one, its other end dangled out behind.
From the tent emerged a woman with her buckets. The water man placed the hose-end to his mouth, applied a lusty suction, and the water came gushing forth. He filled both receptacles, collected the price, and then drove on to the next.
Sardonically Van reflected that even the fine little stream of water on his claim, in a land where water was so terribly scarce, was absolutely worthless as an asset. It was over a mountain ridge of such tremendous height that it might as well have been in the forests of Maine.
Despite the utter hopelessness of his present situation, his spirits were not depressed. Gettysburg, he reflected, was a genius for bumping into queer old prospectors—relics of the days of forty-nine, still eagerly pursuing theirignis fatuousof gold—and from some such desert wanderer he would doubtless soon pick up a claim. There was nothing like putting Gettysburg upon the scent.
Van wrote a note to his partners.
"Dear Fellow Mourners:
"Have just discovered a joke. I was salted on the 'See Saw' property. Our pipe dream is defunct. Have gone over to lay out remains. If you find any oldtimers who have just discovered some lost bonanza, take them into camp. Don't get drunk, get busy. Be back a little after noon."
This he left with the hay-yard man where his partners would stop when they arrived. Mounted on Suvy, his outlaw of the day before, he rode from Goldite joyously. After all, what was the odds? He had been no better off than now at least a hundred times. At the worst he still had his partners and his horse, a breakfast aboard, and a mountain ahead to climb.
Indeed, at the light of friendship in his broncho's eyes, as well as at the pony's neigh of welcome, back there at the yard, he had felt a boundless pleasure in his veins. He patted the chestnut's neck, in his rough, brusque way of companionship, and the horse fairly quivered with pleasure.
For nearly two hours the willing animal went zig-zagging up the rocky slopes. The day was warming; the sun was a naked disk of fire. It was hard climbing. Van had chosen the shorter, steeper way across the range. From time to time, where the barren ascent was exceptionally severe, he swung from the saddle and led the broncho on, to mount further up as before.
Thus they came in time to a zone of change, over one of the ridges, a region where rocks and ugliness gave way to a growth of brush and stunted trees. These were the outposts, ragged, dwarfed, and warped, of a finer growth beyond.
Fifteen miles away, down between the hills, flowed a tortuous stream, by courtesy called a river. It sometimes rose in a turgid flood, but more often it sank and delivered up its ghost to such an extent that a man could have held it in his hat. Nevertheless some greenery flourished on its banks.
When Van at last could oversee the vast, unpeopled lands of the Piute Indian reservation, near the boundary of which his salted claim had been staked, he had only a mile or so to ride, and all the way down hill.
He came to the property by eleven o'clock of the morning. He looked about reflectively. The rough board cabin and the rougher shaft-house were scarcely worth knocking down for lumber. There, on the big, barren dike, were several tunnels and prospects, in addition to the shaft, all "workings" that Briggs had opened up in his labors on the ledge. They were mere yawning mockeries of mining, but at least had served a charlatan's requirements. A few tools lay about, abominably neglected.
The location was rather attractive, on the whole. The clear stream of water had coaxed a few quaking aspens and alders into being, among the stunted evergreens. Grass lay greenly along the bank, a charming relief to the eye. The sandy soil was almost level in the narrow cove, which was snugly surrounded by hills, except at the lower extremity, where the brook tumbled down a wide ravine.
Van, on his horse, gazed over towards the Indian reservation idly. How vain, in all likelihood, were the wonderful tales of gold ledges lying within its prohibited borders. What a madness was brewing in the camps all around as the day for the reservation opening rapidly approached! How they would swarm across its hills and valleys—those gold-seeking men! What a scramble it would be, and all for—what?
There were tales in plenty of men who had secretly prospected here on this forbidden land, and marked down wonderful treasures. Van looked at his salted possessions. What a chance for an orgie of salting the reservation claims would afford!
With his pony finally secured to a tree near at hand, the horseman walked slowly about. A gold pan lay rusting, half filled with rock and dirt, by a bench before the cabin. It was well worth cleaning and taking away, together with some of the picks, drills, and hammers.
He carried it over to the brook. There he knelt and washed it out, only to find it far more rusted than it had at first appeared. He scooped it full of the nearest gravel and scoured it roughly with his hands. Three times he repeated this process, washing it out in the creek.
Ready to rise with it, cleaned at last, he caught up a shallow film of water, flirted it about with a rotary motion, to sluice out the last bit of stubborn dross, then paused to stare in unbelief at a few bright particles down at the edge, washed free of all the gravel.
Incredulous and not in the least excited, he drew a small glass from has pocket and held it on the specks. There could be no doubt of their nature. They were gold.
Interested, but doubting the importance of his find, Van pawed up half a pan full of gravel and dipped the receptacle full of water. Then stirring the sand and stuff with his hand, he panned it carefully.
The result at the end was such a string of colors as he had never washed in all his wide experience. To make a superficial prospect of the claim he proceeded to pan from a dozen different places in the cove, and in every instance got an exceptional showing of coarse, yellow gold, with which the gravel abounded.
He knelt motionless at last, beside the stream, singularly unperturbed, despite the importance of his find. Briggs had slipped up, absolutely, on the biggest thing in many miles around, by salting and selling a quartz claim here to a man with a modest sum of money.
The cove was a placer claim, rich as mud in gold, and with everything needed at hand.
Then and there the name of the property was changed from the "See Saw" to the "Laughing Water" claim.