"Is this your father's enterprise?" he asked, in the hope of an
affirmative answer. A man of this quality would hang the minister if
necessary.

"Oh no. We've got to climb the hill and cross the upper Basin before
we reach our mine. This is the ore from the San Luis tunnel."

She was, happily, of the sunny world now, and, with a gay smile,
turned her horse into a narrow trail and called back to him: "We climb
here." He followed, admiring the strength and grace of her rounded
figure as her horse zigzagged up the steep acclivity. She was troubled
by no problems at this moment. She was rather a daughter of the
mountains, a sister to the eagles.

She stopped once or twice to permit him to locate the far-famed peaks
rising one by one to the south of them, and the third time she drew
rein he was a-foot, and she said, "We're almost to the top of this
grade; it's easier in the Basin."

"I am thinking only of my horse," he answered. "You see, he is
carrying a forty-pound saddle, and is not so fresh as yours. I'm sorry
to delay you."

The Basin was a most glorious valley, bowl-shaped, green with grass
and groves of aspen and fir, and flooded with a cataract of sunshine.
All about it ran a rim of lofty summits, purple in shadow, garnet and
gold and green in the sun. Here and there a prospect-hole showed like
a scar, or a gray, dismantled stamp-mill stood like a disintegrating
bowlder beside its yellow-gray dump of useless ore. Serviss, familiar
with the rise and fall of the silver-miner, looked over the lovely
valley with a certain sense of satisfaction, for he was able to
reconstruct its beauty before that flood of devastating humankind
swept up from the eastern plain. "Nature is reasserting her dominion,"
he said, aloud. "Mining is a wounding business--like murder."

The girl glanced away to the south. "We'll have to hurry if we reach
camp by one o'clock," she called, and he waved his hand as a sign of
surrender to her leadership.

They overtook a long train of burros bearing a most miscellaneous
cargo of odds and ends of machinery, nail-kegs, iron-rods, bundles of
bolts, lumber, oil, and boxes of groceries.

"This is all father's--all for the new mill," said the girl, nodding
and smiling at the Mexicans in charge of the donkeys. "Hello, Clint!"
she called, cheerily, to another muleteer, a little farther up the
trail, a brown, good-looking young fellow, who saluted her joyfully,
his eyes aglow with adoration.

"Ever