ybody remarked what an energetic fellow
that Bentham was. It was she who studied maps, and catechised miners,
and hammered geography and locations into his hollow head, till
everybody marveled at his broad grasp of the country and knowledge of
its conditions. Of course, they said the wife was a brick, and only a
few wise ones appreciated and pitied the brave little woman.

She did the work; he got the credit and reward. In the Northwest
Territory a married woman cannot stake or record a creek, bench, or
quartz claim; so Edwin Bentham went down to the Gold Commissioner and
filed on Bench Claim 23, second tier, of French Hill. And when April
came they were washing out a thousand dollars a day, with many, many
such days in prospect.

At the base of French Hill lay Eldorado Creek, and on a creek claim
stood the cabin of Clyde Wharton. At present he was not washing out a
diurnal thousand dollars; but his dumps grew, shift by shift, and there
would come a time when those dumps would pass through his sluice-boxes,
depositing in the riffles, in the course of half a dozen days, several
hundred thousand dollars. He often sat in that cabin, smoked his pipe,
and dreamed beautiful little dreams,--dreams in which neither the dumps
nor the half-ton of dust in the P. C. Company's big safe, played a part.

And Grace Bentham, as she washed tin dishes in her hillside cabin,
often glanced down into Eldorado Creek, and dreamed,--not of dumps nor
dust, however. They met frequently, as the trail to the one claim
crossed the other, and there is much to talk about in the Northland
spring; but never once, by the light of an eye nor the slip of a
tongue, did they speak their hearts.

This is as it was at first. But one day Edwin Bentham was brutal. All
boys are thus; besides, being a French Hill king now, he began to think
a great deal of himself and to forget all he owed to his wife. On this
day, Wharton heard of it, and waylaid Grace Bentham, and talked wildly.
This made her very happy, though she would not listen, and made him
promise to not say such things again. Her hour had not come.

But the sun swept back on its northern journey, the black of midnight
changed to the steely color of dawn, the snow slipped away, the water
dashed again over the glacial drift, and the wash-up began. Day and
night the yellow clay and scraped bedrock hurried through the swift
sluices, yielding up its ransom to the strong men from the Southland.

And in th