and endured military imprisonment in Japan.

The one thrill of which they were still capable, was when, true to
promise, thirty years of age, his wild oats sown, he returned to
California with a wife to whom, as he announced, he had been married
several years, and whom all his three guardians found they knew. Mr.
Slocum had dropped eight hundred thousand along with the totality of
her father's fortune in the final catastrophe at the Los Cocos mine in
Chihuahua when the United States demonetized silver. Mr. Davidson had
pulled a million out of the Last Stake along with her father when he
pulled eight millions from that sunken, man-resurrected, river bed in
Amador County. Mr. Crockett, a youth at the time, had "spooned" the
Merced bottom with her father in the late 'fifties, had stood up best
man with him at Stockton when he married her mother, and, at Grant's
Pass, had played poker with him and with the then Lieutenant U.S.
Grant when all the little the western world knew of that young
lieutenant was that he was a good Indian fighter but a poor poker
player.

And Dick Forrest had married the daughter of Philip Desten! It was not
a case of wishing Dick luck. It was a case of garrulous insistence on
the fact that he did not know how lucky he was. His guardians forgave
him all his wildness. He had made good. At last he had performed a
purely rational act. Better; it was a stroke of genius. Paula Desten!
Philip Desten's daughter! The Desten blood! The Destens and the
Forrests! It was enough. The three aged comrades of Forrest and Desten
of the old Gold Days, of the two who had played and passed on, were
even severe with Dick. They warned him of the extreme value of his
treasure, of the sacred duty such wedlock imposed on him, of all the
traditions and virtues of the Desten and Forrest blood, until Dick