The Desert Valley

From here the two Desert Valley men went forward on foot to show them the spot which Alan Howard had chosen as the most likely site for a camp. They walked to the end of the flat where the reddish, walls shut in; here was an angle of cliff and in the angle was a cleft some three or four feet wide. They passed into this and found that it offered a steep, winding way upward. But the distance was not great, and in ten minutes they had come to the top. Here again was a level space, a wide tableland, offering less of the desert menace and hostility and something more of charm and the promise of comfort. For a gentle breeze stirred here, and off yonder were scattered pines and cedars and in a clump of trees was a ring of verdure. They went to it and saw the spring. It was but a sort of mud-hole of yellowish, thickish water. But water it was, with green grass growing about it and with the shade of dusty trees over it. Beyond were the strange-shaped uplands, distant cliffs and peaks broken into a thousand grotesque forms, with bands of colour in horizontal strata across them as though they had been painted with a mighty brush.

'What though I have never been here until this second?' cried Longstreet triumphantly. 'I know it, all of it, every inch and millimetre of it! I could have made a map of it and laid the colours in. I have read of it, studied it--I have written of this country! Having been right in everything else, am I to be mistaken in the matter of its minerals? I said give me three months to find gold! Why, it's a matter to wonder at if I don't locate my mine in three days!'

The two men grinned readily. Before now they had heard men talk with the gold fever upon them.

'There's gold pretty near everywhere,' admitted Barstow, 'if a man can make it pay. But right now I guess me and Chuck had better start getting your stuff up the rocks. Suit you all right here for a camp?'

Helen turned and looked toward the south. There, broad and fertile below her, running away across the miles, were the Howard acres. She even made out the clutter of head-quarters buildings. Somehow she fancied that the sweep of homely view snatched from these bleak uplands something of their loneliness. When her father announced that this was just the spot he had longed for, Helen nodded her approval. Here for a time was to be home.