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 fiancé, 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