CHAPTER IX

PROGRESS AND SALT

Goldite, by the light of day, presented a wonderful spectacle. It was
a mining camp positively crystallizing into being before the very eyes
of all beholders. It was nearly all tents and canvas structures--a
heterogeneous mixture of incompleteness and modernity to which the
telegraph wires had already been strung from the outside world. It had
no fair supply of water, but it did have a newspaper, issued once a
week.

A dozen new buildings, flimsy, cheap affairs, were growing like
toadstools, day and night. Several brick buildings, and shacks of mud,
were rising side by side. Everywhere the scene was one of crowds,
activity, and hurry. Thousands of men were in the one straight street,
a roughly dressed, excited throng, gold-bitten, eager, and open-handed.
Hundreds of mules and horses, a few bewildered cows, herds of great
wagons, buggies, heaps of household goods, and trunks, with
fortifications of baled hay and grain, were crowded into two great
corrals, where dusty teamsters hastened hotly about, amidst heaps of
dusty harness, sacks of precious ore and the feed troughs for the
beasts.

Beth had slept profoundly, despite the all-night plague of noises,
penetrating vividly through the shell-like walls of the house. She was
out with Elsa at an early hour, amazingly refreshed and absorbingly
interested in all she heard and saw. The sky was clear, but a chill