wind blew down from the mountains, flapping canvas walls in all
directions.

The building wherein the women had rested was a wooden lodging house,
set barely back from the one business street of the camp. Next door
was a small, squat domicile constructed of bottles and mud. The
bottles were laid in the "mortar" with their ends protruding. Near by,
at the rear of a prosperous saloon, was a pyramid of empty bottles,
fully ten feet high--enough to build a little church.

Drawn onward by the novelty of all the scene, Beth crossed the main
street--already teeming with horses, wagons, and men--and proceeded
over towards a barren hill, followed demurely by her maid. The hill
was like a torn-up battlefield, trenched, and piled with earthworks of
defense, for man the impetuous had already flung up great gray dumps of
rock, broken and wrenched from the bulk of the slope, where he quested
for gleaming yellow metal. He had ripped out the adamant--the matrix
of the gold--for as far as Beth could see. Like ant-heaps of
tremendous dimensions stood these monuments of toil--rock-writings,
telling of the heat and desire, the madness of man to be rich.

The world about was one of rocks and treeless ridges, spewed from some
vast volcanic forge of ages past. It was all a hard, gray, adamantine
world, unlovely and severe--a huge old gold furnace, minus heat or
fire, lying neglected in a universe of mountains that might have been a
workshop in the ancient days when Titans wrought their arts upon the
earth.

Beth gazed upon it all in wonder not unmingled with awe. What a place
it was for man to live and wage his puny battles! Yet the fever of all