ce of lost
liberty outside which he had roamed in barbarous content. His love was
riveting bonds upon him, making his spirit as water. He felt a revolt,
a resistance against her power, which was gently impelling him toward
home, hearth, neighbors--the life in which he felt his place was gone.

The next day the strange mood seemed an ugly dream. It was not he who
had lain wakeful and questioned his right to bend Fate to his own
demands. He rode beside his wife at the head of the train as they
rolled out in the bright, dry morning on the road to the river. There
were men behind them, and in front the dust rose thick on the rear of
pack trains. They filed across the valley, watching the foot hills
come nearer and the muffling robe of the chaparral separate into
checkered shadings where the manzanita glittered and the faint, bluish
domes of small pines rose above the woven greenery.

Men were already before them, scattered along the river's bars, waist
high in the pits. Here and there a tent showed white, but a blanket
under a tree, a pile of pans by a blackened heap of fire marked most of
the camps. Some of the gold-hunters had not waited to undo their packs
which lay as they had been dropped, and the owners, squatting by the
stream's lip, bent over their pans round which the water sprayed in a
silver fringe. There were hails and inquiries, answering cries of good
or ill luck. Many did not raise their eyes, too absorbed by the hope
of fortune to waste one golden moment.

These were the vanguard, the forerunners of next year's thousands,
scratching the surface of the lower bars. The sound of their voices
was soon left behind and the river ran free of them. Pack trains
dropped from the line, spreading themselves along the rim of earth
between the trail and the shrunken current. Courant's party moved on,
going higher, veiled in a cloud of brick-colored dust. The hills swept
up into bolder lines, the pines mounted in sentinel files crowding out
the lighter leafage. At each turn the vista showed a loftier uprise,
crest peering above crest, and far beyond, high and snow-touched, the
summits of the Sierra. The shadows slanted cool from wall to wall, the
air was fresh and scented with the forest's resinous breath. Across
the tree tops, dense as the matted texture of moss, the winged shadows
of hawks floated, and paused, and floated again.

Here on a knoll under a great pine they pitched the tent. At its base