ly snow came, Amberley could
see, more plainly than before, the doings of the encroaching enemy.
Great black scars were made in the snow; sledges, laden with weird,
ungainly masses of wood and iron, were hauled up the mountain-side. Here
and there a structure appeared, that had a grotesque resemblance to a
gallows. The uncouth monsters planted themselves along the hillside,
where they breathed forth smoke and emitted strange noises. Amberley
could hear the rattling of chains, the creaking of timbers; a hoarse
shout would sometimes come ringing across the Gulch through the thin
frosty air, if the wind was that way.

[Illustration. "A TOWN OF RUDE FRAME HUTS HAD SPRUNG UP IN THE HOLLOW
BELOW."]

In September it was that the bit of quartz was carried down to
Springtown; before the winter snows had thought of melting, a town of
rude frame huts had sprung up in the hollow below, and Lame Gulch was a
flourishing mining-camp. All the rough-scuff of the countryside
promptly gathered there, and elbowed, with equal indifference, the
honest miner, the less honest saloon-keeper, and the capitalist, the
degree of whose claim to that laudatory adjective was not to be so
easily fixed. No one seemed out of place in the crazy, zigzag streets,
no sound seemed foreign to this new, conglomerate atmosphere. The fluent
profanity of the mule-driver, the shrill laugh of the dance-hall; the
prolonged rattle and final roar of the ore-chute, the steady pick of the
laborer at the prospect-hole;--each played its part to burden and stain
the pure, high air that had seemed so like the air of Heaven itself.

Amberley stayed on in his lonely lean-to, or roamed over his desecrated
acres, bewildered and aggrieved. What were the mountains thinking of to
admit these savage hordes! Whither should he go, where should he find a
refuge, since his trusted allies had played him false? He loathed it
all, loathed most of all Enoch's exultant suggestion that there might be
gold on their land.

"But we'll lay low for a while," Enoch said, with an air of profound
cunning. "We'll wait till they're plumb crazy, and then we kin git our
own price!"

And Amberley stayed on all through that trying winter, simply because he
knew of no better place to go to, and the spring came and found him
there, unreconciled, to be sure, but leading his usual life. And so it
happened that one day, when the snow had disappeared from all the
southerly slopes, and the wind was toward t