The Golden Woman

To want the realities with their simple, unrestrained passions, and the means of obtaining them at their disposal, was to demand them. To demand them was to have them. They wanted a saloon. They wanted an organized means of gambling, they wanted a town, with all its means of satisfying appetites that had all too long hungered for what they regarded as the necessary pleasures of life. They wanted a means of spending the accumulations gleaned from the ample purse of mother Nature. And, in a moment, they set about the work of possessing these things.

As is always the case the means was not far to seek. It needed but one mind, keener in self-interest than the rest, and that mind was to hand. Beasley Melford, at no time a man who cared for the physical hardships of the life of these people, saw his opportunity and snatched it. He saw in it a far greater gold-mine than his own claim could ever yield him, and he promptly laid his plans.

He set to work without any noise, any fuss. He was too foxy to shout until his purpose was beyond all possibility of failure. He simply disappeared from the camp for a week. His absence was noted, but no one cared. They were too full of their own affairs. The only people who thought on the matter were the Padre and Buck. Nor did they speak of it until he had been missing four days. Then it was, one evening as they were returning from their traps, the Padre gave some inkling of what had been busy in his thoughts all day.

"It's queer about Beasley," he said, pausing to look back over a great valley out of which they had just climbed, and beyond which the westering sun was shining upon the distant snow-fields.

Buck turned sharply at the sound of his companion's voice. They were not given to talking much out on these hills.

"He's been away nigh four days," he said, and took the opportunity of shifting his burden of six freshly-taken fox pelts and lighting his pipe.

The Padre nodded.

"I think he'll be back soon," he said. Then he added slowly: "It seems a pity."

"His coming back?" Buck eyed his companion quickly.

"Yes."

"Wher' d'you reckon he's gone?"

The elder man raised a pair of astonished brows.

"Why, to Leeson Butte," he said decidedly. Then he went on quietly, but with neither doubt nor hesitation: "There's a real big change coming here--when Beasley gets back. These men want drink, they are getting restless for high play. They are hankering for--for the flesh-pots they think their gold entitles them to. Beasley will give them all those things when he comes back. It's a pity."