woman preyed upon by a gnawing grief. He noted, without
understanding, a change in her bearing to Courant and his to her.
Without words to give it expression he saw in her attitude to the
leader a pliant, docile softness, a surreptitious leap of light in the
glance that fell upon him in quick welcome before her lids shut it in.
With Courant the change showed in a possessive tenderness, a brooding
concern. When, at the morning start, he waited as she rode toward him,
his face was irradiated with a look that made the old man remember the
dead loves of his youth. It was going to be all right Daddy John
thought. David gone, whether forever or for an unknown period, the
mountain man might yet win her. And then again the old man fell a
wondering at something in them that did not suggest the unassured
beginnings of courtship, a settled security of relation as of complete
unity in a mutual enterprise.

One afternoon a faint spot of green rose and lingered on the horizon.
They thought it a mirage and watched it with eyes grown weary of the
desert's delusions. But as the road bore toward it, it steadied to
their anxious gaze, expanded into a patch that lay a living touch on
the earth's dead face. By the time that dusk gathered they saw that it
was trees and knew that Humboldt was in sight. At nightfall they
reached it, the first outpost sent into the wilderness by the new
country. The red light of fires came through the dusk like a welcoming
hail from that unknown land which was to be theirs. After supper Daddy
John and Courant left the girl and went to the mud house round which
the camps clustered. The darkness was diluted by the red glow of fires
and astir with dusky figures. There were trains for California and
Oregon and men from the waste lands to the eastward and the south,
flotsam and jetsam thrown up on the desert's shore. Inside, where the
air was thick with smoke and the reek of raw liquors, they heard again
the great news from California. The old man, determined to get all the
information he could, moved from group to group, an observant listener
in the hubbub. Presently his ear was caught by a man who declared he
had been on the gold river and was holding a circle in thrall by his
tales. Daddy John turned to beckon to Courant and, not seeing him,
elbowed his way through the throng spying to right and left. But the
mountain man had gone. Daddy John went back to the gold seeker and
drew him dry of info