to go, and, with anger again
rising in his breast, he turned away, caught and mounted his horse, and,
without a word or a glance, galloped from the station.

CHAPTER X.

THE RACE FOR GOLD.

A land may be bare and barren, uninhabitable and desolate; the cold
winds of the snow-borne North may blow across it, and freeze it into
ice-bound sterility; or the blazing fury of the tropic sun may pour down
upon it, and scorch it into a dreary waste of glaring, burning sand; but
if there is gold in it, and if man comes to know that the gold is in it,
desolation, frozen sterility, or scorching waste, are alike doomed for
conquest. The gold may lie in the sand; the gold may be held under the
ice, or be hidden away in massive tiers of rock hard enough and big
enough to defy the wear and tear of time through countless ages; but
when man comes--man who knows and understands the needs and uses of
humanity--the gold will be wrested from whatever holds it, and carried
away in pride and glory to the greatest centres of population to grace
still further the triumphs of mankind over the grim tyrannies of Nature.

A good many men may suffer in the process. The cold, or the heat, or the
lurking fever germ, will own many a victim before they own defeat, and
even amongst the men themselves--the men who should be united as in the
face of a common enemy--there will be the wherewithal and the impulse to
swell the price paid for the hard-won fruits of victory. And so it was
at Birralong.

The find of gold on Ripple Creek (as the stream was named where Gleeson
unconsciously led the Boulder Creekers to wealth) brought many a change
among the men who found it.

For the first few weeks after the discovery each man was too busy
winning as much as he could in the least possible time to notice very
much what was going on around him. The banks of the creek were pretty
well lined with men, and all the men were working wherever the layer of
sandy gravel was found under the scanty topping of turf. Higher up the
stream the turf lay upon rock, and lower down the stream there was no
gravel at all to be found. Only was there the one area, fortunately
large enough to give all the men from Boulder Creek working room, over
which the sandy gravel occurred, as though at some time in the remote,
bygone days a small lake had been formed in the course of the stream,
into which the water from higher up had carried down and spread out the
gold-bearing drift,