ain" creeping like a serpent, on and on before her.

At the forward end Glen was dragging the thing persistently over hills
and dales, and bearing the rod for Pratt with his transit to sight.

The surveyor himself was at times as much as a mile or more behind,
dumbly waving Glen to right or left, as he peered through his glass and
set the course by the compass and angles of his transit. Anon he
signaled the two to wait, and Beth sat down to watch him come, "set
up," and wave them onward as before.

She was thus alone, at the end of the chain, for hours at a stretch.
So often as Pratt came up from the rear and established a station for
his instrument, she asked how the line was working out, and what were
the prospects for the end.

"Can't tell till we get much closer to the claim," said Pratt, with
never varying patience. "We'll know before we die."

In the heat that poured from sky and rocks it might have been possible
to doubt the surveyor's prediction. But Beth went on. Her exhaustion
increased. The glare of the cloudless sky and greenless earth seemed
to burn all the moisture from her eyes. The terrible silence, the
dread austerity of mountains so rock-ribbed and desolate, oppressed her
with a sense of awe.

She was toiling as many a man has toiled, through the ancient,
burned-out furnace of gold, so intensely physical all about her; and
also she was toiling no less painfully through the furnace of gold that
love must ever create so long as the dross must be burned from human
ore that the bullion of honor, loyalty, and faith may shine in its
purity and worth.

She began to feel, in a slight degree, the tortures that Van, old
Gettysburg, Napoleon, and Dave had undergone for many weary years. It
was not their weakness for the gold of earth that had drawn them
relentlessly on in lands like these; it was more their fate, a species
of doom, to which, like the helpless puppets that we are, we must all
at last respond.

She felt a new weight in the cruelty whereby the owners of the
"Laughing Water" claim had been suddenly bereft of all they possessed
after all their patient years of serving here in this arid waste of
minerals. The older men in Van's partnership she pitied.

For Van she felt a sense of championing love. His cause was her cause,
come what might--at least until she could no longer keep alive her
hope. Her passion to set herself to rights in his mind was great, but
secondary, after all, to