vanic strength.

"Don't--make me," she begged, closing her eyes in a species of ecstacy
that no man may understand. "I'd rather--not--Van--please. Only about
a minute now. Ain't it funny--that love--can burn you--up?" Her grip
had tightened on his hand.

The doctor ran to the window, which he found already opened. He ran
back in a species of frenzy.

"Make her take it, make her take it! God!" he said. "Not to do
anything--not to do a thing!"

Queenie smiled at Van again--terribly. Her fingers felt like iron
rods, pressing into his flesh. As if to complete her renunciation she
dropped his hand abruptly. She mastered some violent convulsion that
left the merest flicker of her life.

"Good-by, Van--good luck," she whispered faintly.

"Queenie!" he said. "Queenie!"

Perhaps she heard. After an ordeal that seemed interminable her face
was calm and still, a faint smile frozen on her marble features.

Van waited there a long time. Someway it seemed as if this thing could
be undone. The place was terribly still. The doctor sat there as if
in response to a duty. He was dumb.

When Van went out, the man on the doorstep staggered in.

The moon was up. It shone obliquely down into all that rock-lined
basin, surrounded by the stern, forbidding hills--the ancient,
burned-out furnace of gold that man was reheating with his passions.
Afar in all directions the lighted tents presented a ghostly unreality,
their canvas walls illumined by the candles glowing within. A jargon
of dance-hall music floated on the air. Outside it all was the desert
silence--the silence of a world long dead.

Van would gladly have mounted his horse and ridden away--far off, no
matter where. Goldite, bizarre and tragic--a microcosm of the world
that man has fashioned--was a blot of discordant life, he felt, upon an
otherwise peaceful world. As a matter of fact it had only begun its
evening's story.

He stood in the road, alone, for several minutes, before he felt he
could begin to resume the round of his own existence. When he came at
length to the main street's blaze of light, a deeply packed throng
could be seen in all the thoroughfare, compactly blocked in front of a
large saloon.

Culver, the Government representative in the land-office needs, had
been found in his office murdered. He had been stabbed. Van's knife,
bought for Gettysburg, had been employed--and found there, red with its
guilt.

All this Van was prese