is father lay. Yes,
Jane was dead!

Job listened and listened--all else fell unheeded on his ear. Jane was
dead, his Jane, and lay beneath the pines far down the Gold City road!
It was all he heard--it was all he knew. He did not stop to explain;
he heard Bess neigh again, and rushed out into the shadowy night, and
mounted her with only a bridle. He heeded not the old man's cries. His
brain was on fire, his soul in agony. Only one thing he knew--Jane was
dead and he must go to her; go as fast as Bess could fly down that
road which many a dark night she had traveled.

Men standing on the steps of the Miners' Home that evening said a dark
ghost went by like a flash--it was too swift for a flesh-and-blood
horse and rider--and they crept in by the bar and drank to quiet their
fears.

He found it at last. The fresh earth, the uplifted pine cross with the
one word "Jane" on it, told the story. He left Bess to roam among the
white stones and the grass, flung himself across that mound, half hid
by withered flowers, and lay as if dead--dead as she who slept
beneath. At last the sobs came; the tears mingled with the flowers;
the heart of manhood was bleeding. Jane was dead! How had it happened?
Who had done this awful thing? God or man, it mattered little to him.
The dreadful fact that burned itself deeper and deeper into his soul
was--Jane was dead!

Oh, that awful night! The stars forgot to shine; the trees moaned over
his head; the lightnings played on yonder mountains. The thunders
rolled, and he heeded them not; the rain-drops pattered now and then
on the branches above, but he never knew it.

Gethsemane! Once it had seemed a strange, far-away place where the
heart broke and the cup was drunk to its bitter dregs. Job had
wondered what it meant. He knew now. It was here on the slopes of the
Sierras. These pines were the gnarled olive trees, this was the garden
of grief. Gethsemane--it had come into the life of Job Malden.

At length the first great storm of grief had spent itself, and he sat
alone in the silence broken only by the far-off mutter of thunder; sat
alone with his dead and his thoughts. Again, as on far Glacier Point,
memory came and turned the pages of a lifetime. He was back in the old
boyhood days, laughing at her dusty, tanned feet--he would kneel to
kiss them now, if he could; again he was climbing Sugar Pine trail
with her; he was following her and Dan out on that bitter winter
night, maddened with j