ay, Helen, you ought to take him in hand and make him
go to college. You're the only one who can manage him. He has the making
of one of the biggest engineers in the country."

"Why don't you try your hand, Ralph? Mother says that you are his god
yet. When he gets cornered, he insists that his way is just what Mr.
Winston would do, and there he sticks. Father and mother both ask when
you are coming back."

Winston shook his head almost regretfully. "I sometimes wish I had never
left, but that's too late now. When I get a little despondent, the roar
of the monitors eating into the gravel, the swish of the water and the
clatter of boulders in the sluices get into my ears till I'm nearly
wild."

"That is all over now. When I came away there were only a few
discouraged miners digging in the banks and listening for the officers
to come around and stop even that."

Winston went on even more regretfully.

"And I remember when you and I went barefoot, wading around with gold
pans and scrapping as to which had the biggest pan--"

Helen rose to go. Her intuition told her that they were on dangerous
ground.

"Old things and times are gone. We have put away childish things and
gold pans, for something new."

Winston took her hand. A momentary pressure on her part and she withdrew
it. She could not look into his eyes.

"Be careful about the new, Helen. There's fool's gold in these diggings
too."

"Which reminds me, our last scrap as children was over that very thing."

Then the door closed behind her and Winston was alone.

CHAPTER FIVE

A country that has yielded a billion and a half of gold is, perforce,
well and favorably known to the uttermost parts of the earth. Though the
stream of yellow wealth diminishes, or even ceases to flow, yet the
channel is carved through which the thoughts of men longingly roll. Upon
such a land no limit of impossibility is placed. Upon what has been, the
faith of man lays the foundations of nobler structures yet to be. The
structures may rise and fall, but the foundation yet remains. It matters
not to the builders of golden castles that, between the gold fields of
California and the line that marked another nation, the whole of New
England could lie, like an island in a sea of desert sand; California
was yet California, and the Pactolean sands of the Cascades and the
Sierras spread their yellow sheen over the whole vast expanse of
mountain, and valley, and desert.

Winston