over the parting from it, which
had taken place the previous day. To him had fallen the lot of handing
it over to the farm-wife who had been sent on ahead from Leeson Butte
to prepare it for her employer's coming. And the full sense of his
loss was still upon him. Wrong as he knew himself to be, he resented
the newcomer's presence in his old home, and could not help regarding
her as something in the nature of a usurper.

The camp to which he was riding was a wretched enough place. Nor could
Nature, here in her most luxuriant mood, relieve it from its sordid
aspect. A few of the huts were sheltered at the fringe of the dark
woods, but most were set out upon the foreground of grass, which
fronted the little stream.

As Buck approached he could not help feeling that they were the most
deplorable huts ever built. They were like a number of inverted square
boxes, with roofs sloping from front to back. They were made out of
rough logs cut from the pine woods, roofed in with an ill-laid thatch
of mud and grass, supported on the lesser limbs cut from the trees
felled to supply the logs. How could such despairing hovels ever be
expected to shelter men marked out for success? There was disaster,
even tragedy, in every line of them. They were scarcely even shelters
from the elements. With their broken mud plaster, their doorless
entrances, their ill-laid thatch, they were surely little better than
sieves.

Then their surroundings of garbage, their remnants of coarse garments
hanging out upon adjacent bushes, their lack of every outward sign of
industrial prosperity. No, to Buck's sympathetic eyes, there was
tragedy written in every detail of the place.

Were not these people a small band of regular tramp gold-seekers? What
was their outlook? What was their perspective? The tramp gold-seeker
is a creature apart from the rest of the laboring world. He is not an
ordinary worker seeking livelihood in a regular return from his daily
effort. He works under the influence of a craze that is little less
than disease. He could never content himself with stereotyped
employment.

Besides, the rot of degradation soon seizes upon his moral nature. No
matter what his origin, what his upbringing, his education, his
pursuit of gold seems to have a deadening effect upon all his finer
instincts, and reduces him swiftly to little better than the original
animal. Civilization is forgotten, buried deep beneath a mire of
moral mud, accumulated i