York to Nevada. In the first
place her young half-brother, Glenville Kent--all the kin she had
remaining in the world--had been for a month at Goldite camp, where she
was heading, and all that he wrote had inflamed her unusual love of
adventure till she knew she must see it for herself. Moreover, he was
none too well. She had come to visit and surprise him.

In the second place, her fiance, Searle Bostwick, he who was now at the
wheel, had also been marooned, as it were, in this sagebrush land, by the
golden allurements of fortune. Beth had simply made up her mind to come,
and for two days past had been waiting, with her maid, at the pretty
little town of Freemont, on the railroad, for Searle to appear in his
modern ship of the desert and treat her to the one day's drive into
Goldite, whither he also was bound.

The man now intent on the big machine and the sandy road was a noticeable
figure, despite the dust upon his raiment. He was a tall, well-modeled
man of thirty-five, with an air of distinction upon him, materially
heightened by his deep-set, piercing gray eyes, his firm, bluish jaw, and
the sprinkling of frost in his hair.

He wore no moustache. His upper lip, somewhat over long, bore that same
bluish tint that a thick growth of beard, even when diligently shaved,
imparted to his face. He was, indeed, a handsome being, in a somewhat
stern, determined style.

He was irritated now by the prospect of labor at the station. Even
should he find some willing male being whose assistance with the tire
might be invoked, the task would still involve himself rather
strenuously; and above all things he loathed rough usage of his hands.
For three more miles he cursed the mechanism, then he halted the car at
the station.

A shack that served as lodging-house, saloon, and dining-room, a shack
for a stable, and a shack for a shed, together with a rough corral,
comprised the entire group of buildings at the place. Six or eight fine
cottonwoods and a number of twisted apple trees made the little place
decidedly inviting. Behind these, rising almost sheer from the level
yard, the mountains heaved upward grayly, their vast bulk broken, some
hundred yards away, by a yawning rock canyon, steep and forbidding.

The station proprietor, who emerged from the door at sound of the halting
machine, was a small, lank individual, as brown as an Indian and as
wrinkled as a crocodile. The driver in the car addressed him shortly.