The Furnace of Gold

Now Nevada, though robed in gray and white--the gray of sagebrush and the white of snowy summits--had never yet been accounted a nun when once again the early summer aroused the passions of her being and the wild peach burst into bloom.

It was out in Nauwish valley, at the desert-edge, where gold has been stored in the hungry-looking rock to lure man away from fairer pastures. There were mountains everywhere--huge, rugged mountains, erected in the igneous fury of world-making, long since calmed. Above them all the sky was almost incredibly blue--an intense ultramarine of extraordinary clearness and profundity.

At the southwest limit of the valley was the one human habitation established thereabout in many miles, a roadside station where a spring of water issued from the earth. Towards this, on the narrow, side-hill road, limped a dusty red automobile.

It contained three passengers, two women and a man. Of the women, one was a little German maid, rather pretty and demure, whose duty it was to enact the chaperone. The other, Beth Kent, straight from New York City, well--the wild peach was in bloom!

She was amazingly beautiful and winning. It seemed as if she and not the pink mountain blossoms must be responsible for all that haunting redolence in this landscape of passionless gray. Her brown eyes burned with glorious luminosity. Her color pulsed with health and the joyance of existence. Her red lips quivered with unuttered ecstacies that surged in the depths of her nature. Even the bright brown strands of her hair, escaping the prison of her cap, were catching the sunlight and flinging it off in the most engaging animation. She loved this new, unpeopled land--the mountains, the sky, the vastness of it all!

For a two-fold reason she had come from New 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.