Heavy footed and shamefaced they walked up on the porch. Kesney saw the care and neatness with which the hard hewn planks had been fitted. Here, too, was the same evidence of lasting, of permanence, of strength. This was the sort of man a country needed. He thought the thought before he fixed his attention to it, and then he flushed.

Inside, the room was as neat as the girl herself. How did she get the floors so clean? Before he thought, he phrased the question. She smiled.

“Oh, that was Chat’s idea! He made a frame and fastened a piece of pumice stone to a stick. It cuts into all the cracks and keeps them very clean.”

The food smelled good, and when Hardin looked at his hands, Chat motioned to the door.

“There’s water an’ towels if you want to wash up.”

Neill rolled up his sleeves and dipped his hands in the basin. The water was soft, and that was rare in this country, and the soap felt good on his hands. When he had dried his hands, he walked in. Hardin and Kesney had already seated themselves and Lock’s wife was pouring coffee.

“Men,” Lock said, “this is Mary. You’ll have to tell her your names. I reckon I missed them.”

Mary. Neill looked up. She was Mary, too. He looked down at his plate again and ate a few bites. When he looked up, she was smiling at him.

“My wife’s name is Mary,” he said, “she’s a fine girl!”

“She would be! But why don’t you bring her over? I haven’t talked with a woman in so long I wouldn’t know how it seemed! Chat, why haven’t you invited them over?”

Chat mumbled something, and Neill stared at his coffee. The men ate in uncomfortable silence. Hardin’s eyes kept shifting around the room. That pumice stone. He’d have to fix up a deal like that for Jane. She was always fussing about the work of keeping a board floor clean. That wash stand inside, too, with pipes made of hollow logs to carry the water out so she wouldn’t have to be running back and forth. That was an idea, too.

They finished their meal reluctantly. One by one they trooped outside, avoiding each other’s eyes. Chat Lock did not keep them waiting. He walked down among them.

“If there’s to be shootin’,” he said quietly, “let’s get away from the house.”

Hardin looked up. “Lock, was that right, what you said in the mill, was it a fair shootin’?”

Lock nodded. “It was. Johnny Webb prodded me. I didn’t want trouble, nor did I want to hide behind the fact I wasn’t packin’ an iron. I walked over to the saloon not aimin’ for trouble. I aimed to give him a chance if he wanted it. He drawed an’ I beat him. It was a fair shootin’.”

“All right.” Hardin nodded. “That’s good enough for me. I reckon you’re a different sort of man than any of us figured.” “Let’s mount up,” Short said, “I got fence to build.”

Chat Lock put his hand on Hardin’s saddle. “You folks come over some time. She gets right lonesome. I don’t mind it so much, but you know how women folks are.”

“Sure,” Hardin said, “sure thing.”

“An’ you bring your Mary over,” he told Neill.

Neill nodded, his throat full. As they mounted the hill, he glanced back. Mary Lock was standing in the door way, waving to them, and the sunlight was very bright in the clean swept door yard.

TRAP OF GOLD

Wetherton had been three months out of Horsehead before he found his first color. At first it was a few scattered grains taken from the base of an alluvial fan where millions of tons of sand and silt had washed down from a chain of rugged peaks; yet the gold was ragged under the magnifying glass.

Gold that has carried any distance becomes worn and polished by the abrasive action of the accompanying rocks and sand, so this could not have been carried far. With caution born of harsh experience he seated himself and lighted his pipe, yet excitement was strong within him.

A contemplative man by nature, experience had taught him how a man may be deluded by hope, yet all his instincts told him the source of the gold was somewhere on the mountain above. It could have come down the wash that skirted the base of the mountain, but the ragged condition of the gold made that improbable.

The base of the fan was a half-mile across and hundreds of feet thick, built of silt and sand washed down by centuries of erosion among the higher peaks. The point of the wide V of the fan lay between two towering upthrusts of granite, but from where Wetherton sat he could see that the actual source of the fan lay much higher.

Wetherton made camp near a tiny spring west of the fan, then picketed his burros and began his climb. When he was well over two thousand feet higher he stopped, resting again, and while resting he dry-panned some of the silt. Surprisingly, there were more than a few grains of gold even in that first pan, so he continued his climb, and passed at last between the towering portals of the granite columns.

Above this natural gate were three smaller alluvial fans that joined at the gate to pour into the greater fan below. Dry-panning two of these brought no results, but the third, even by the relatively poor method of dry-panning, showed a dozen colors, all of good size.

The head of this fan lay in a gigantic crack in a granite upthrust that resembled a fantastic ruin. Pausing to catch his breath, his gaze wandered along the base of this upthrust, and right before him the crumbling granite was slashed with a vein of quartz that was liberally laced with gold!

Struggling nearer through the loose sand, his heart pounding more from excitement than from altitude and exertion, he came to an abrupt stop. The band of quartz was six feet wide and that six feet was cobwebbed with gold.

It was unbelievable, but here it was.

Yet even in this moment of success, something about the beetling cliff stopped him from going forward. His innate caution took hold and he drew back to examine it at greater length. Wary of what he saw, he circled the batholith and then climbed to the ridge behind it from which he could look down upon the roof. What he saw from there left him dry-mouth and jittery.

The granite batholith was obviously a part of a much older range, one that had weathered and worn, suffered from shock and twisting until finally this tower of granite had been violently upthrust, leaving it standing, a shaky ruin among younger and sturdier peaks. In the process the rock had been shattered and riven by mighty forces until it had become a miner’s horror. Wetherton stared, fascinated by the prospect. With enormous wealth here for the taking, every ounce must be taken at the risk of life.

One stick of powder might bring the whole crumbling mass down in a heap, and it loomed all of three hundred feet above its base in the fan. The roof of the batholith was riven with gigantic cracks, literally seamed with breaks like the wall of an ancient building that has remained standing after heavy bombing. Walking back to the base of the tower. Wetherton found he could actually break loose chunks of the quartz with his fingers.

The vein itself lay on the downhill side and at the very base. The outer wall of the upthrust was sharply tilted so that a man working at the vein would be cutting his way into the very foundations of the tower, and any single blow of the pick might bring the whole mass down upon him. Furthermore, if the rock did fall, the vein would be hopelessly buried under thousands of tons of rock and lost without the expenditure of much more capital than he could command. And at this moment Wetherton’s total of money in hand amounted to slightly less than forty dollars.

Thirty yards from the face he seated himself upon the sand and filled his pipe once more. A man might take tons out of there without trouble, and yet it might collapse at the first blow. Yet he knew he had no choice. He needed money and it lay here before him. Even if he were at first successful there were two things he must avoid. The first was tolerance of danger that might bring carelessness; the second, that urge to go back for that ‘little bit more’ that could kill him.