the stream, which was
fordable there, a young man and his younger wife, with the saddle-marks
of the city on them, had their white nest. Agnes could hear the bride
singing early in the morning, when the sun came up and poured its melted
gold over that hopeful scene, with never a cloud before its face.

Twenty miles farther along, toward Comanche, Dr. Slavens had pitched his
tent among the rocks on the high, barren piece of land which he had
selected blindly, guided by Hun Shanklin's figures. He was not a little
surprised, and at the same time cheered and encouraged, to find, when he
came to locating it, that it was the spot where they had seen Shanklin
and another horseman on the afternoon of their stage excursion, when the
two had been taken by Smith as men of evil intent, and the doctor had
been called to the box to handle the lines.

His neighbors in the rich valley below him regarded him with doubt of
his balance, and that was a current suspicion up and down the river
among those who did not know the story. But the politicians in Meander,
and those who were on hand before the filing began, who knew how Jerry
Boyle had nursed Axel Peterson, and how he had dropped the Scandinavian
when the stranger rode up unexpectedly and filed on Number One, believed
that the doctor had held inside information, and that his claim was
worth millions.

But if the quarter-section contained anything of value, there was no
evidence of it that Dr. Slavens could find. It was about the crudest and
most unfinished piece of earth that he ever had seen outside the
Buckhorn Canyon. It looked as if the materials for making something on a
tremendous pattern had been assembled there, thrown down promiscuously,
and abandoned.

Ledges of red rock, which seemed as if fires had scorched them for ages,
stood edgewise in the troubled earth, their seamed faces toward the sky.
It was as if nature had put down that job temporarily, to hurry off and
finish the river, or the hills beyond the river, and never had found
time to come back. Tumbled fragments of stone, huge as houses, showing
kinship with nothing in their surroundings, stood here thickly in a
little cup between the seared hills, and balanced there upon the sides
of buttes among the streaks of blue shale.

A little grass grew here and there in carpet-size splotches, now yellow
and dry, while that in the valley was at its best. Spiked plants, which
looked tropical, and which were as green duri