e to her; but he watched
Harris sometimes when the girl paid him any little attention, and he could
read only absolute trust in the man's eyes.

Overton was not given to keen analysis of people or motives; a healthy
unconcern pervaded his mind as to the affairs of most people. But
sometimes the girl's character, her peculiar knowledge, her mysterious
past, touched him with a sense of strange confusion, yet in the midst of
the confusion--the deepest of it--he had put all else aside when she
appealed to him, and had followed her lead into the wilderness.

And as she ran from him with the particles of gold, and carried them, as
he bade her, to Harris, he followed her with his gaze until she
disappeared through the green wall of the bushes. Once he started to
follow her, and then stopped, suddenly muttered something about a "cursed
fool," and flung himself face down in the tall grass.

"It's got to end here," he said, aloud, as men grow used to thinking when
they live alone in the woods much. Then he raised himself on his elbows
and looked over the little grassy dip of the land to where the stream from
the hills sparkled in the warm sun; and then away beyond to where the
evergreens raised their dark heads along the heights, looking like somber
guardians keeping ward over the sunny valley of the twin springs. Over
them all his gaze wandered, and then up into the deep forest above him--a
forest unbroken from there to the swift Columbia.

The perfect harmony of it all must have oppressed him until he felt
himself the one discordant note, for he closed his eyes with a sigh that
was almost a groan.

"I'll see it all again--often, I suppose," he muttered; "but never quite
as it is now--never, for it's got to end. The little bits of gold I found
are a warning of the changes to come here--that is the way it seems to me.
Queer how a man will change his idea of life in a year or so! There have
been times when I would have rejoiced over the prospect of wealth there is
here; yet all I am actually conscious of is regret that everything must
change--the place--the people--all where gold is king. Pshaw! what a fool
I would seem to any one else if he knew. Yet--well, I have dreamed all my
days of a sort of life where absolute happiness could be lived. Other
men do the same, I suppose--yes, of course. I wonder if others also come
in reach of it too late. I suppose so. Well, reasoning won't change it. I
marked out my own path--marked it