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, gra.s.sless, 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.

CHAPTER VIII

A NIGHT'S EXPENSES

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 gla.s.s 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 pa.s.sing. Everything was rushing to Goldite. There were hors.e.m.e.n, 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 pa.s.sed 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 mult.i.tude 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 part.i.tion. 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 l.u.s.tily 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 inst.i.tution 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 gra.s.s was not green.

Van searched for Trask and found him "cashing in" a lot of a.s.sorted chips, representing his winnings at a faro game at which he had been "bucking."

"h.e.l.lo, 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.

CHAPTER IX

PROGRESS AND SALT

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 sh.e.l.l-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 t.i.tans 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 a.s.sayer'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. d.i.c.k!"

"h.e.l.lo--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.