life surged
through them, touching their squalid surroundings to the high mystery
of things unreal.

The strangeness of it was that he was a man of large and not very
creditable experience of women, yet her deep, limpid eyes, her sweet
voice, the immature piquancy of her movements that was the expression
of her, had stirred his imagination more potently than if he had been
the veriest schoolboy nursing a downy lip. He could not keep his eyes
from this slender, exquisite girl, so dainty and graceful in her mobile
piquancy. Fire and passion were in his heart and soul, restraint and
repression in his speech and manner. For the fire and passion in him
were pure and clean as the winds that sweep the hills.

But for the girl--she was so little mistress of her heart that she had
no prescience of the meaning of this sweet content that filled her. And
the voices that should have warned her were silent, busy behind the
purple hills with lies and love and laughter and tears.

CHAPTER 5. ENTER SIMON HARLEY

The prospector's house in which they had found refuge was perched on
the mountainside just at one edge of the draw. Rough as the girl had
thought it, there was a more pretentious appearance to it than might
have been expected. The cabin was of hewn logs mortared with mud, and
care had been taken to make it warm. The fireplace was a huge affair
that ate fuel voraciously. It was built of stone, which had been
gathered from the immediate hillside.

The prospect itself showed evidence of having been worked a good deal,
and it was an easy guess for the man who now stood looking into the
tunnel that it belonged to some one of the thousands of miners who
spend half their time earning a grubstake, and the other half
dissipating it upon some hole in the ground which they have duped
themselves into believing is a mine.

From the tunnel his eye traveled up the face of the white mountain to
the great snow-comb that yawned over the edge of the rock-rim far
above. It had snowed again heavily all night, and now showed symptoms
of a thaw. Not once nor twice, but a dozen times, the man's anxious
gaze had swept up to that great overhanging bank. Snowslides ran every
year in this section with heavy loss to life and property. Given a
rising temperature and some wind, the comb above would gradually settle
lower and lower, at last break off, plunge down the precipitous slope,
bringing thousands of tons of rock and snow with it, and, perhap