voice, the immature piquancy of her movements that was the expression of
her, had stirred his imagination more potently than if he had been the
veriest schoolboy nursing a downy lip. He could not keep his eyes from
this slender, exquisite girl, so dainty and graceful in her mobile
piquancy. Fire and passion were in his heart and soul, restraint and
repression in his speech and manner. For the fire and passion in him were
pure and clean as the winds that sweep the hills.

But for the girl--she was so little mistress of her heart that she had no
prescience of the meaning of this sweet content that filled her. And the
voices that should have warned her were silent, busy behind the purple
hills with lies and love and laughter and tears.



CHAPTER 5. ENTER SIMON HARLEY

The prospector's house in which they had found refuge was perched on the
mountainside just at one edge of the draw. Rough as the girl had thought
it, there was a more pretentious appearance to it than might have been
expected. The cabin was of hewn logs mortared with mud, and care had been
taken to make it warm. The fireplace was a huge affair that ate fuel
voraciously. It was built of stone, which had been gathered from the
immediate hillside.

The prospect itself showed evidence of having been worked a good deal, and
it was an easy guess for the man who now stood looking into the tunnel
that it belonged to some one of the thousands of miners who spend half
their time earning a grubstake, and the other half dissipating it upon
some hole in the ground which they have duped themselves into believing is