Читать книгу The Golden Foundling - Alan Sullivan - Страница 3

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THE girl on the leading horse tightened her bridle, leaned a little forward in the saddle, and stared breathlessly over the western slope of a great rift in the Rockies.

“Good, isn’t it, Dolph?” she said to the young man close behind.

It was very good—so good that the past three weeks’ trail-riding through the mountains seemed to have led up to this swimming revelation of valleys, torrents, cascades and high lonely peaks that shouldered out of an abyss of solitude. But, for all of their beauty, Jennifer Martin had curious feelings about these mountains. She found them rather oppressive.

The young man pulled up. To his right, the naked rocks climbed precipitously: to his left the world fell away into a yawning ravine with a ribbon of white water making music far below.

“About another week before we hit the Fraser, eh?”

“Are you sorry?”

He was not sure. Sorry for some reasons, but not for others. There was Jennifer herself, to whom, by this time, he was expected to be engaged. During these past weeks he appeared to have been making discoveries—both about her and himself—and the engagement hung fire. He had thought that this wilderness journey would uncover something in them both. It had—but something unlooked for. Perhaps he was more puzzled than sorry.

“Well,” he said diplomatically, “it has been wonderful—like nothing else on earth. A far cry from Belgrave Square.”

She had a vision of Belgrave Square with its huge houses, immaculate front steps, shining windows, its air of massive and unalterable formality. Sometimes she felt a little like Belgrave Square herself, because she was apt to give the impression of coldness and reserve when she did not mean to. And ever since they entered the mountains she had been conscious of that other warmer self within herself—the one that nobody saw or understood.

“Dolph,” she asked curiously, “does all this suggest anything—uncover anything in you?”

He gave her a straight look. Level grey eyes, she had, and light brown hair, small, perfectly shaped mouth, small straight nose. Patrician! It was written in the clean modelling of head, the straight set of slim shoulders. One saw the type a thousand times a day in Mayfair. Not beautiful—but very arresting—with attributes that would endure after mere beauty had faded.

“Do you speak from experience?” he queried.

“Perhaps—a little. Mountains make me feel small—I suppose that’s natural—and as though my affairs and ambitions were not worth considering in the general scheme of things.”

“I fancy we all get a touch of that. Anything else?”

“I’ve got no further—yet.”

“They don’t make you hungry?”

“I have a shocking appetite,” she laughed.

“I don’t mean that, but hungry for something you know not what—hungry to live as you never lived before—more fully—hungry to feel and give and receive at a tremendous rate. That’s what I mean.”

He put this in an odd tone, a little rough and jerky. It conveyed intensity as well as restraint, and he was obviously very much in earnest.

“That sounds rather primitive.” She was sorry the minute she said it.

“Well, it’s honest, anyway. Are you being quite honest too—don’t you get any of it?”

She shook her head, gave the bridle a twitch, and moved on. Another little rift between them. She hated these rifts, and so often they seemed to be of her making. Was it always that way with lovers?

Their affair had been going on for three months, beginning at a dance given by Mrs. Martin, Jennifer’s mother, when Dolph in his explosive way said that she was the girl for him. Jennifer, who had loved him secretly for a year past, took it in her own cool, sedate fashion, so that presently Dolph began to feel that the thing was incomplete. There were no extremes in her, and apparently no passions. She was too sophisticated to be afraid of love, but nature had not given her the ability to express what she really felt. It would have sounded forced and unnatural. And perhaps any sort of abandon was—well—a shade common.

Young Hudson had made this discovery but gradually. But now another Jennifer—the holdback one—seemed to have displaced the first girl to whom he had emptied his heart. He still admired this successor enormously—liked her good looks, her good form, her unconscious air of breeding. Yet he missed something. She was too bloodless.

This transition had already commenced when John Martin, Jennifer’s father, took it into his head to retire from business. He celebrated the event by carrying off his wife and two daughters to trail ride in the Rockies, with an invitation to Dolph, just down from Cambridge. Dolph, independent as to income, and about to enter his father’s shipping business later on, jumped at the chance. That was a little more than a month ago.

All rather wonderful, this journey, and far removed from anything any of them had known before. The effects were variable. Martin and his wife were seeing more of each other than in a long time past. Julianna, three years older than Jennifer, was absorbing the setting for a novel—her first. Jennifer struggled against a sort of austerity that these mountains seemed to impose on her. Dolph, responding in a very different fashion, was stimulated. This magnificence gave him a sort of free rapture, a consciousness of passion. It made him want to tilt the cup of life and drain it in one glorious draught.

The trail had widened, so that now they were able to ride abreast.

“Where do we camp to-night, Dolph?”

He pointed ahead. Three miles away, at the edge of a hanging valley, there was a glint of water near a clearing in the dark carpet of timber. One made out a few tiny buildings, like the miniature villages that children arrange along their pygmy railways. A thread of smoke climbed into the windless air. This human unit looked utterly remote from the rest of the world, plunged in stupendous isolation and fenced off by the jagged rampart of mountains. They seemed to contemplate the camp with a sort of titanic amusement.

“What is it?” asked the girl.

“Some mining prospect—fellow looking for a fortune.”

“A brave man,” she said spontaneously.

“Perhaps—yes—I suppose so. You wouldn’t like a bit of that life, I mean a few months, and not just riding past with a wave of the hand?”

“N-no, I don’t think so.”

“Not under any circumstances?” He put this with a rather curious look.

“You mean you and me?”

“Assume that I do.”

“You’d be bored with it and with me in a week, Dolph. Too much of one single thing—and not another scrap.”

“You don’t feel that we could keep each other going?”

“I feel that we’re such a part of the outside world, both of us, that we’d very soon miss it. Does that sound mondaine and blasé. You’d make dreadful discoveries about me in no time. You wanted me to be honest just now—so there you are.”

He perceived that in her was no flame. Would it be like that if they married, with none of the sudden burning variations of mood that, though they hurt, made life worth living nevertheless?

He was pondering over this when a clatter of hoofs sounded behind, and Julianna rode up.

“Well, you two, isn’t this marvellous! Jim says we stop here for lunch, and do look at that darling camp. It must be the Stevens’ place.”

Jennifer slid to earth. “Who is Stevens?”

“The mining man who owns it: Jim just told me. Wouldn’t you love to stay there for awhile?”

“I would,” grinned Dolph, “but Jen wouldn’t.”

“Why not, Jen?”

“Too cut off.”

“It’s just what I’d like. I’d wash out my metropolitan mind, and start all over again. Life would have a new taste.”

She said this with a wistful look, and Dolph felt distinctly sympathetic. Julianna’s face was square and freckled, her nose indeterminate, her chin rather mannish. It was the eyes that redeemed her—very candid—very full of understanding and judgment.

It was curious about Julianna. While still a child, she seemed to have realized that Jennifer was the one who would always attract first attention, but this did not upset her in the least, and the result was worth noting. Jennifer acquired a collection of would-be lovers, while Julianna built up a circle of friends who adored her and swore by her. There was no envy in her nature, no feminine rivalry, nothing predative or acquisitive. She had a clear white spirit. It shone through her eyes, expressing itself in a thousand delicate and charming ways.

It was therefore natural that for her friends she should become the depository of all their troubles, hopes, disappointments and love affairs. These were poured out to her in an endless flood. “Tell Julianna, and find out what she thinks”—that was the thing. But the bringers of troubles never stopped to ask themselves whether this was an imposition, and whether, perhaps, she had troubles of her own.

With the rest came Jennifer, the sister whom she understood to the last degree. Jennifer leaned on that comprehension, because Julianna knew as did no other how deeply and secretly she loved, and that her reticence, when it came to any avowal, was impossible to be overcome. So there were no sensations of envy between these two. But now she recognized symptoms of discord between the lovers. Jennifer looked actually bored with the man she loved. How could that be?

More hoofbeats on the trail, and the girls’ parents came in sight; John Martin with his broad, good-humoured face burned scarlet, his wife very much what Jennifer would be in some twenty-five years. She had the same distinction of face and figure. With them four guides, of whom the chief, Glacier Jim, was a lithe, lean man who rode as though there were not a bone in his active body.

Mrs. Martin pulled up with a sigh of satisfaction, and shook one foot free of the stirrup.

“Bob, give me a cigarette. Hullo, children, are you famished too? I think this is the best day of all: and, Bob, your nose is a flame of fire.”

She sat there, smiling at them, very happy because in middle life she had acquired a totally new set of sensations. It ought now to be possible to enjoy the rest of her allotted span a good deal more than had seemed possible a month ago. There was just one small fly in the ointment. It had been her idea that Dolph should be invited on this excursion, but the result, so far, fell short of expectations. A touch of romance for lovers in the mountains—that was what she anticipated. But these two youngsters were taking each other in the coolest manner imaginable. She regarded them now with an observant eye till hunger asserted itself in no unmistakable fashion.

“Jim, I’m starving.”

“It’ll be ready right soon, ma’am.”

“Well, hurry, if you don’t want me to die on your hands.”

The guide, busy over a swiftly kindled fire, gave one of his dry chuckles. He had been steering trail-riders through the mountains for years, but liked this party best of them all. Presently there spread the smell of coffee and the sizzling of brook trout in a pan of bacon. These delectable odours encompassed the others, transforming them into ravenous mammals whose entire future centred in that pan.

Mrs. Martin threw away her cigarette. It was instantly stamped on by another guide, and Martin nodded approvingly.

“Forest fires, Mary! I’ve told you a dozen times.”

“Sorry, Bob, but you don’t know how I feel inside.” She threw her leg over the saddle, sat for a moment, then jumped to earth. Touching the ground, she gave a sharp little cry and subsided very quickly.

“Bob, my ankle! What rotten luck!”

Jim, who like most guides was an adept at first aid, was on the spot in an instant. He examined her foot, and looked up with a wry expression.

“Reckon, it’s a sprain, ma’am. Got sort of twisted. Set right where you are, please.”

Martin had out his flask, and the others clustered round. His wife, a little sick with pain, smiled up at them bravely.

“So sorry, everybody, and I’m a perfect fool. But I can get along somehow, can’t I, Jim?”

“You’d oughter lie up two or three days anyway, ma’am. That ain’t going to make any difference, is it?”

“No,” broke in Martin, “certainly not, and that’s what she’ll do. Where do we camp—here?”

“Down yonder at the head of that hanging valley’d be a sight better. More firewood and brush for beds. More shelter, too. That’s if the lady can make it.”

“Of course I can, Jim. Now give me some of that bacon.”

They made the best of it, all of them, for the next ten minutes, at the end of which Dolph slipped away. Then Martin inquired further about the camping-place.

“About a quarter mile this side of Stevens’ mine, sir.”

Martin stared at the distant clearing. “Is it a real mine?”

“Well,” drawled the guide, “there’s them that says a mine is nothing but a hole in the ground with a liar on top; but Stevens is straight enough. He’s white. Been there most of two years now. I ain’t ever camped there before.”

“What a dreadfully lonely life!” speculated Mrs. Martin.

Jim nodded. “That’s right, ma’am, specially when it comes winter with nothing but snowslides for amusement. The camp was near wiped out last March. But there’s many as likes it.”

She shivered a little. “Sounds awful to me. Is there a telephone there—do they get any letters?”

“Folks don’t hanker over much about letters in the mountains: but there’s a mail-carrier happens along every fortnight when the trails are passable. Course there’s shooting and lots of it—elk—black bear—most likely a few grizzlies—partridge and the like. Hidden Valley they call this place, folks being sort of surprised when they see it first.”

Talk dwindled as they sat in the full pouring rays of a midday sun. A river, winding somewhere out of sight, sang to them in faint liquid measures, and they could see cataracts, distant and filmy, gleaming like silver veils against the naked face of the mountain flanks. A golden eagle, deserting its eyrie in the rocky heights, swam lazily through invisible fields of air. There was a sort of forgetfulness about the scene. So immense it was, so wide and untainted, so majestic, and yet so tiny a corner of the still vaster world without.

Presently Martin roused himself with an effort.

“By George, I was nearly asleep. If you think you can stand it, Mary, I think we’d better make a move to camp. Where’s Dolph?”

“Went on by himself most half an hour past, sir. Said he was going to spot the place for Mrs. Martin’s tent.”

“Good—we’d better follow him.”

Ten minutes later there remained only the steaming black coals of a fire over which, obedient to forest law, Glacier Jim had emptied a pan of dishwater.

Stevens’ Hope! Two years ago a mining recorder had entered the name on his map with a not unsympathetic smile. So many Hopes there were, and so few of them had borne fruit.

Stevens came on the lode at the end of a year’s prospecting. His grub had nearly run out, and the prospecting ardour burned low in his breast. This find was good, but nothing sensational—a ribbon of bluish-white quartz projecting from the hillside, and traceable at intervals for a half-mile. Gold in it—he could see that—but only back-breaking work would prove whether the thing was payable.

Stevens went back to the fringes of civilization, returning with four men—and Pirrie of the yellow hair. There was a history about Pirrie, whom he had found in a tent on the Caribou Trail fifteen years previously, a gaunt little skeleton of a waif nearly at the point of death. That was at the tail of the great Caribou Rush, when life was so hard that only the Chinamen washing gravel in the creek-bottoms were able to make a day’s pay by a week’s work.

Who Pirrie was, he never knew, having taken her from the arms of a dying and delirious woman whom he found in a tent by the Caribou Trail, at which the big heart of the man ached with pity. Nor was there anything he could learn of this hapless pair, save that the woman had staked a worthless claim on the gold-bearing stream, and was nearly starved.

Pirrie of the yellow hair grew and nourished. With every successive year she loved this quiet-eyed rescuer the more, till gradually, in the process of this love, the past with its confused unhappy memories was practically obliterated. Stevens did not marry, and adored the girl as the daughter of his heart.

Pirrie was eighteen when she arrived at Stevens’ Hope on the back of an ancient mule following the pack-horses laden with tools, explosives and all the first necessities of a mining camp. Then a year and a half of loneliness till young Hugh Purdey happened along. Purdey had three thousand dollars. When he saw Pirrie, he promptly fell in love with her, this being an understandable procedure for any man. She had become very lovely.

The outcome was that Purdey and his money both stayed. The three thousand went into Stevens’ Hope in consideration of a one-quarter interest. Stevens used this money to engage more labour from a contractor named Danks, who thereupon came with four Swedes to sink the shaft another hundred feet. It was now down sixty of the hundred—with no great improvement in sight.

Such was the situation at Stevens’ Hope when, four miles away, Mrs. Robert Martin, of Belgrave Square, London, landed on a stone and sprained her ankle.

Pirrie at this particular moment was underground, watching her father—she had always called him father—and young Purdey at work. Stevens swung the hammer, while Hugh held the drill, twisting and churning it slightly between strokes. The sharp clink of steel on steel leaped back from the rocky walls, echoing along the dark level toward one glimmering light that marked where the shaft plunged still deeper. Stuck into the breast of the drift, steel holders supported candles to work by.

This scene, this booming cavern, this isolation, these bending, labouring figures, this battle in the solid womb of the earth—there was nothing new about it to Pirrie. Mining was in her blood. She knew every corner of Stevens’ Hope, knew how the ore varied, where it was good and where poor. On happy days when free gold could be seen in the quartz, she was elated. When the quartz was low grade, her spirits fell accordingly. Just now they were only fair.

Stevens leaned on his hammer, and wiped a sweating brow.

“Take a spell off, Hugh.”

“Bit tough to-day, isn’t it?” The young man straightened his numb fingers. “Hullo, Pirrie! Where did you come from?”

“I’ll hold for awhile now,” she said.

Stevens laughed at her. “No you won’t—too risky.”

“But, Dad, I often have.”

“I know it—and too often. Better quit now, while your fingers are whole.”

She made a face at him. “Have some fresh water—it’s just up from the creek.”

They drank, while she, moving closer, put a brown hand against the jagged face of quartz.

“Any visible gold to-day?”

“ ’Fraid not.”

“There’s that—and that,” she said hopefully.

“Pyrites, Pirrie, pyrites.”

She shrugged her shoulders. Pirrie he had called her from the first—this being his contraction of pyrites—the name of a mineral resembling gold that has deceived many an amateur miner. And here it was, staring at her.

“I wish you hadn’t christened me that, Dad.”

“But why?”

“It makes me feel that I’m not exactly what people take me to be.”

“I don’t know of anyone being taken in—unless it’s Hugh,” he grinned.

“Don’t waste any sympathy on me,” said Hugh.

Stevens lit his pipe. “Look here, you youngsters had better go up. I’ll load and fire these holes.”

“Let me,” she begged. “I know how, perfectly.”

“If you’re not careful you’ll turn into a disreputable old miner like me. And Hugh, don’t you ever let her hold a drill for you again. Those are orders. Now off with you both. Pirrie, you might pan these samples. Keep half for me to assay.”

She went, rather unwillingly, with a little sack of fragments that Stevens had knocked off across the face of the drift. They were the basis of the daily test of values. Young Purdey gathered up the drills that needed sharpening. Then the sound of scraping feet, and silence rushed in, a silence beyond description.

Now that he was alone, Stevens yielded to a fit of depression that had been growing on him for weeks past. Would the Hope ever make a real mine? Sometimes, when things looked dark, he wondered if a man—if any man—was anything but a fool to set himself against Nature and aspire to hacking a fortune out of her solid bowels.

Nature was queer—tricky—a flirt—a jade. When the mood took her, she would store her shelves with treasure, and fling out wealth haphazard where no wealth was presumed to exist. Again she was mean—niggardly—a skinflint, accepting the sacrifice of men, and paying nothing in return.

Stevens’ Hope hung in the balance. The means of its discoverer were long since exhausted, young Purdey’s money nearly gone, and there were Danks and his Swedish miners to pay. What if no purchaser came along, and they were not paid? And was the Hope too deep in the wilderness to be found by any purchaser?

Thus ruminated Stevens while Pirrie and Hugh were hoisted in the big steel bucket, swaying and twisting as they rose, their heads close together. The girl hoped that Hugh would leave her at the surface. But, once in daylight, he reached for the samples.

“Let me carry them.”

“No, I will.”

“Well, I’ll crush them for you, and you do the panning.”

“I think you need a wash more than they do crushing,” she said with a little laugh. “And I feel like banging something to-day.”

He looked at her soberly. “What’s the matter?”

“Nothing—except that I’m not very good company—for anyone.”

“Am I anyone?”

“Would you mind if I said you were—would that be rude?”

“Not rude—but——”

“Unkind?”

“Perhaps,” he admitted.

“Then, Hugh, I’ve just got to be unkind. I can’t help it—and can’t explain. Don’t ask me to.”

They stood, facing each other, these young folk of the mountains, close to the shaft-mouth, streaked with the grey slime that one collects in every metal mine, their eyes, strangely alike in level candour, boring into each other, and oblivious to the fact that Danks, fifty feet away at the hoisting engine, was watching closely. Something had been roused in each—and stretched itself as though for combat.

“I seem to have asked for it and got it,” said Purdey.

“No, you didn’t, and it’s my fault—but to-day I’ve got to be alone.”

“Tired of me?” he snapped.

She looked at him in the strangest fashion as though with these words he had assumed a new shape, and in the blue pools of her eyes he saw the dawn of a sort of wonder. Then she turned quickly away.

The rest was automatic. She struck into a narrow trail, her special trail that was used by no one else unless invited. It wound through a clump of cedar, between big boulders that had descended from the higher slopes, across a little glade where the black bears came to eat blueberries in summertime, till finally it led to Pirrie’s most private sanctum.

This was a spot beside the hurrying creek, here only a few yards wide, where the shore was moss-covered and cedar-timbered. The stream slid by, its waters milky from melting glaciers high above. There was a stretch of shining sand, and behind submerged rocks one could see the mountain trout winnowing their wide pink tails. Sometimes an elk would come noiselessly to quench his thirst, and always there was the flash of lithe brown bodies where the mink chased each other for the sheer joy of chasing.

A few yards from the opposite shore ran the main trail that led through the foothills to the Pacific. Occasional riders came this way, though they had never camped here, and it always filled her with a great hunger. How free they were! What wonderful clothes the women wore! How they laughed and talked with the men! When she heard them coming she would feel shy as well as hungry, and hide herself so that she could see and not be seen. Then the happy, carefree procession that jogged along to the outside world she longed for. What a silence after the voices and horses’ feet died away! There was only the too familiar chuckle of the stream. And even the stream was going somewhere. It was moving on.

That idea had dwelt with her now for months past till it amounted to an obsession. Hugh Purdey came, upstanding, broad-shouldered, steady-eyed, and fell in love with her instantly. He was still very much in love. She responded in a way because there was so little else to do, till it seemed unlikely that he could do much to help her to move on. Like herself he was anchored to Stevens’ Hope. His money had gone underground.

She thought about that now, and it oppressed her. The bag of samples at her feet meant nothing. Just bits of rock. It was her duty to test these in a gold-pan, but to-day they were only reminders that she was utterly lonely, and fastened down here. Youth was leaping in her veins—with nothing for youth to feed on. The mountains, her gigantic friends of so many years, closed in on her, shutting off all escape.

Her lips began to tremble, and a great tear trickled down her cheek. They came fast. She hid her face in her hands, sobbing as though her heart would break.

Into this desolation cut a young voice, very clear-pitched and tense with sympathy.

“Hullo!—I say, what’s the matter? Want any help?”

In the dappled shadows across the creek a young man sat on a bay horse. His eyes met Pirrie’s, there came a great splashing as the horse floundered through swift water, and the next moment the stranger slid from a drenched saddle, and bent over her.

“What’s wrong?” he asked anxiously.

Pirrie, thrilling to the core, shook her golden head, afraid to look up. “I was only b-being foolish.” This in a very shaky tone.

“But why cry when you’re foolish? I always laugh.”

This was infectious, and very slowly she tilted a streaked face. He was stooping low, his head close to hers, and for just an instant these two searched each other with the wide frank stare that only youth can give. The colour crept to her temples, and Dolph swore that never in his life had he seen anything half so lovely. The yellow of her hair made a patch of pale flame against the dark background of cedar. Then she sent him such a smile as when the sun glints through a summer shower.

“I suppose that’s the most sensible thing to do, but I’m not very sensible.”

He was about to assure her that he hoped she never would be, but choked that back. “May I introduce myself? I’m Dolph Hudson—from London.”

“You live in London!”

“For just as long as I can’t get out of it. This is a sight better. And you—er——?”

“I’m Pirrie Stevens, and live here.” She captured a stray curl, and tried to look more sedate.

“You—ah—you live here! You!”

“Yes—because I can’t get out of it.”

He looked very incredulous. “How perfectly amazing! And for how long?”

“The last two years.”

“But who else is there—like yourself?” he demanded, frowning a little.

“Oh, no one—I’m the only woman. It’s my father’s mine—Stevens’ Hope.”

This seemed to give the young man a good deal to consider, and there was a perceptible pause before he spoke again.

“Are you often—er—foolish like you were just now?”

“Sometimes—it varies, you know. It comes when everyone seems to be moving on except me.” She threw a stick into the creek, and pointed. “Like that. Even that gets somewhere.”

“And you’ve never been to England?”

“I’ve never been a hundred miles from the Rocky Mountains.”

“Good Lord!” He hesitated, feeling for his cigarettes. “Do you smoke?”

“It isn’t nice for a girl to smoke.”

Dolph blinked at her. “Who on earth told you that?”

“No one—but I don’t want to use my mouth for a chimney. Is that foolish too?”

Being very keenly aware of her mouth, he protested that she was entirely right, then glanced at her smooth brown hands. The drill sludge had dried on them so that they showed greyish white patches. Other and similar patches adorned her cheeks.

“I say, have you hurt your hands?”

“It’s nothing,” she said, feeling suddenly very unpresentable. “You get it underground—you can’t help it if you touch anything.”

“You go underground—you!”

She smiled brilliantly. “Why not?”

“Well, perhaps there’s no reason why not—but it’s new in a girl.”

“Am I a new girl to you?”

He nodded with great conviction. “Ab-so-lutely!”

She rather liked that and smiled again, so that he developed an extraordinary interest in her eyes. The eyes were new, too.

“Where are you going now?” she asked wistfully.

“Vancouver by steamer when we reach the coast. Then San Francisco, New York, and home.”

She sat very still, staring speechless into the vision his words created.

“You’ll be doing all that when I’m underground?” she said in a sort of awed whisper.

“Pirrie!” he exploded, “it isn’t fair—upon my soul it isn’t.”

“Do you feel that way, too?”

“Naturally—the thing’s too one-sided—I hate the thought of it.”

She made a pathetic little gesture, and picked up the bag of quartz samples. “Would you like to help me before you go to New York?”

He nodded, devouring her with a gaze beneath which the colour again pervaded her cheeks.

“Then behind that tree you’ll find an iron mortar and pestle, and these bits of rock must be pounded up till the whole thing will go through this screen. After that, I’ll show you.”

He got to work at once, while she watched with a critical eye, shaking her head when he hit too hard and the fragments jumped out.

“You musn’t lose any, because that’s a sample of the lode to-day. Now screen them—that’s right—now pour them into this pan.”

He did as he was told, only half an eye on his work, and marvelling at his luck. She dipped the pan a third full of water, tilted and began to rock it in a peculiar manner so that the coarser particles of rock were washed over its edge. This continued till there remained only a fine pointed streak of white quartz. At the tail of this a few yellow specks were visible.

“That’s gold.”

Dolph was disappointed. “Not much of it, is there?”

“It means about eight dollars’ worth in a ton of ore.”

“Is that good enough?”

“Not nearly,” she said sombrely. “It would take more than twice as much to make the mine pay.”

“Then what are you going to do about it?”

The answer was startling and unexpected. She dropped the pan, looked at him with complete and appealing helplessness, then began to sob under her breath—deep, dry, breathtaking sobs that nearly broke his heart. Instinctively his arms went out, and he held her close.

“I can’t do anything about it,” she got out in a strangled tone, “and no one can.”

“Don’t, Pirrie! You musn’t! Forget the old mine, and we’ll fix it up somehow. You’re going to move on if I have to take you myself. On my soul you are. Don’t, Pirrie, you darling, don’t!”

His lips found hers and touched them. The sobbing ceased. The world dropped into silence save for the chuckling stream; and into that silence came a harsh resentful voice:

“Who’s going to take her?”

Dolph, petrified, twisted his head. Ten feet away stood a young miner, dark, curly-haired, shirt open at the neck, sleeves rolled up. His eyes were blazing.

For the second time that day youth stared at youth, but between these two flamed a sudden and intense antagonism. The newcomer was a little older than Dolph, and more heavily built. His features were blunt, his face square, and he looked distinctly formidable.

Pirrie gave a little cry, but was more fascinated than alarmed. Here, for the first time in her life, were two men apparently about to fight—and about her!

“Hugh! what are you doing here?”

“I’d ask the same question about this fellow.”

Dolph got to his feet, measured the stranger with a critical eye, and decided that chances were rather slim.

“My name’s Hudson,” he said smoothly. “I was riding past, and saw this young lady in trouble, and—er——”

“Offered to take her somewhere else. Thanks for nothing.”

Pirrie tried to speak, but her tongue felt stiff. She glanced at Dolph, liked him more than ever, regarded Hugh, disliked him not a little—and made an indefinite gesture. Why should Hugh be so rude? Just then Dolph smiled and put out his hand.

“Sorry if I’ve mixed things up, Mr.—Mr.——”

“But you haven’t,” flashed Pirrie, now thoroughly roused. “I was having a little private weep, when you came along and thought something was wrong—and why shouldn’t you? Hugh, shake hands with him at once!”

Young Purdey put out an unwilling paw. He had a vague idea of what was wrong, and the advent of this other man in his well-cut clothes and with his general air of breeding did not improve matters. But where did he propose to take Pirrie—and why?

“We’re trail-riding through the mountains,” volunteered Dolph smoothly. “There’s a party of five. Mrs. Martin sprained her ankle, and we’re camping near here for a few days. It’s Mr. Martin’s party, and his two daughters are in it. We come from London, all of us.”

The tension eased, at least superficially, and Hugh, feeling very awkward, said something about Stevens’ Hope. Then came another impasse, ended by Pirrie picking up the pan and quartz samples.

“I’ve got to go up to camp now,” she said to no one in particular.

“Could some of us see the mine?”

“I’d love you to come; we haven’t had any visitors for months. It’s been awfully slow, hasn’t it, Hugh?” This with a provocative little laugh.

Hugh’s expression left no doubt as to how he regarded visitors, at any rate under existing conditions, and Dolph, stealing another glance at the girl, admitted that he would have felt the same. Were these two engaged? And, if not, how on earth had they kept out of it? Definitely—very definitely—he did not want them to be engaged.

Pirrie gave him one swift look that he found intoxicating, and turned into the trail. Hugh, after a look of an entirely different character, followed her. They had progressed a hundred yards in complete silence before he spoke.

“Look here, what does this mean?”

“What does what mean?”

“You know as well as I do. That fellow was kissing you.”

“Was he really? I must have been crying too hard to notice it.” There was a little tremor in her voice, but young Purdey missed that.

“I won’t stand for it,” he blurted.

She halted, wheeled round, and faced him. “Then you can sit down. And what were you doing there, anyway? It’s forbidden ground—and you know it.”

“I begin to see why it’s forbidden,” he parried, very hard hit.

“That’s a perfectly horrid thing to say. Where are your manners?”

“I haven’t got any in a case like this.”

She shook her head as though to ward off a wasp, stared at him—a long steady stare—then revolt burst out unchecked.

“We’d much better settle things now, Hugh.”

“Settle what?” His heart sank at her tone.

“You know perfectly well, and I’ve seen it coming for some time. From now on, I’m free; so are you.”

“Pirrie, what nonsense!”

“I mean every word of it. It wouldn’t work, Hugh, ever.”

“Just because that fellow came along and offered to take you away. I’ll kill him first.”

“No—you won’t kill anyone, and if you try, you’ll only make a fool of yourself again. You trespassed on ground that is mine, and always has been. You saw something that had no harm in it—not the least bit—and perhaps if you’d been more understanding yourself it wouldn’t have happened. Now you say you’re going to kill someone. What nonsense!”

She stood there, tall and straight, eyes very hard and bright, a creature of the woods, but conscious that at last something had been cut away that till that moment had held her bound. As to Hugh, it seemed that the only reason she should have cared was that there was no one else. Even now she did not actually compare him with the trail-rider from London, but something about Dolph had opened the windows of her imagination. And he did understand. That to begin with.

“Then just because some man you’ve never seen before comes along and kisses you, you don’t want me any longer,” growled Hugh.

She choked with anger, tried to speak, and darted up the trail.