which had ruined most men who had come to Gold City to gain the world
and lose their souls, never touched him. That craving for excitement,
the natural heritage of hot-headed youth, which often in that old
mining camp lasted long after the passionate days of young life and
lit the glazed eyes of age with a wild, unnatural fire, never seemed a
part of his nature. Other men fed the fires of passion with the hot
stuff of the "Monte Carlo," and the midnight gaming table, till,
tottering wrecks consumed of self, they lingered on the doorsteps of
Gold City, the ghosts of men that were. The world of appetite was a
foreign realm to him. He looked with contempt on men who lost
themselves in its meshes. But he was a hard man, the people said, and
selfishness and a cold heart were far worse vices in the eyes of the
generous-hearted, rough miners who came and went among these hills,
than what the polished, cold, calculating money-getters of the far-off
city counted as sin. So Andrew Malden was more of a sinner in the
estimation of Gold City than Yankee Sam. Perhaps the ethics of that
mining camp were truer than the world thinks. Perhaps he who sins
against society is worse than he who sins against self.

The fact was that, though Andrew Malden had grown old in Grizzly
county, and no face was more familiar, no one knew him. He was a hard
man, but not as the people meant. There are two kinds of stern men in
this world: Those who are without hearts, who take pleasure in the
suffering of others; and those who, repulsed sometime, somewhere, have
closed the portals of their inmost souls and hid away within
themselves. Such was the "Lord of Pine Tree Mountain," as the boys
used to call him.

Once he was a merry, happy, strong mountain lad in the old Kentucky
hills, where he had helped his father, a hardy New Englander, make a
new home. He had a heart in those old days. He loved the hills and
forests; loved the romping dogs that played around him as he drove the
logging team to the river-mill; aye, more than that, he had loved Mary
Moore. She was bright and sweet and pretty, a bewitching maid, who
seemed all out of place on the frontier. He loved to hear her talk of
Charleston Bay and the Berkshire Hills, and of the days when she
danced the minuet on Cambridge Green. Once he asked her to marry him.
It was the month the war broke out with Mexico. The frontiersmen were
slinging down their axes and swinging their guns across their
shoulder